Think about your past experiences as a writer and rhetor. What are two of your strengths as a writer and rhetor? What are two of your writing weaknesses? Specifically, how would you like to improve as a writer? What could you do or learn to make such improvements? How do you anticipate that this particular course will help you improve as a writer and rhetor?
Answer these questions in 500 words or more. Also, include examples, via at least two hyperlinks, of writing or rhetorical situations that inspire you to be a better writer. It could be song lyrics, a scene from a television show, your favorite book, or a recent article you read. For example, I love reading The Onion. For me, satire is one of my favorite things to read -- but it's not always the easiest thing for me to write. How about you?
I, as a rhetor and writer, have my strengths and weaknesses. There are certain things that inspire me to write and even put my ideas down on paper or on facebook. I hope to improve as a writer by taking and doing well in this course.
ReplyDeleteI believe the one of my strengths as a writer is my ability to use imagery and use very descriptive words to help the reader understand what is happening. It also helps make the reader feel like they are in my shoes. Especially in narratives. Another one of my big strengths as a writer and rhetor is my ability to talk to people and persuade. I enjoy talking with people in rhetorical situations and persuading people to do what the right thing and give them advice. In persuasive writing and rhetoric situations, things are always different. I can find all the positive influences in a certain situation and use them in my advantage to overcome the constraints of the certain rhetoric situation.
My main weakness as a writer is just simple word choice. I tend to repeat a lot in my writing and not use parallelism all the time when i write. That is one of the things i need to work on for this course in order to succeed. I also struggle at concluding paragraphs and papers. I always try to make the reader seriously think about what he/she just read, but i fail to do that more often than not. My sentence variation is also poor at points when i am writing or just writing a letter to people in various situations. My writing could improve greatly in all these areas. It might take some serious time, but I am working on it though.
In my opinion, i could do many things to improve in these areas of my writing and succeed in future writing and rhetorical situations. One thing i could try and do is get help from my professor and my fellow peers in class. Another source of help could just practice writing and getting better at it. I could also improve my vocabulary. In doing that i can improve my word choice; which is one of my weaknesses of my writing. Sentence variation is also a big key in writing that i could improve in. I tend to have run on sentences in my papers or communicating with people through email.
I am convinced that taking this english class will help me improve in all these areas; even the areas that i believe i am already good in. My reasons for my theory are that: we have peer editing days, so i can get help from my peers to get good grades and improve my papers and journal entries. I like the fact that our professor wants us to meet with her twice a semester, so that can give me a chance to talk about writing and different rhetorical situations and see how to approach it and make it better
http://www.sidereel.com/Entourage
http://espn.go.com/blog/bigten
When I was a young child, one of the things I hated the most was to write. Teachers would assign essays and short paragraphs that I would dread to complete. I never seemed to understand the perfect writing style that suited me. Putting my bitterness aside, I always had the desire to become an excellent writer after reading my first book written by Anthony Horowitz. The book that I read was Point Blank, which consisted of a teenage boy that was an undercover agent. After reading this book, I noticed that there are ways to write to spark a person's interest and can possibly bring a great amount of joy writing them as well. My weakness in writing was not being able to write something of great interest before because I would just get right to the point. As I grew up, I began to express my ideas and write down everything I was thinking. I believe that this is one of my talents at writing because a thought correlated to your writing can always be used in some positive way. In addition, I also believe that my spelling and grammar is well when it comes to writing. A weakness that I believe I have when writing a paper is structure. Before I begin to write, I am able to map all of my ideas out onto a piece of paper to help create my rough draft. The only problem is that I am not able to structure those ideas perfectly for the paper to have the most meaning. I also believe that I need to work on how my writing flows. When transitioning from one paragraph to another, I would like the reader to believe that they are just reading one big paragraph. Another thing that I would like to work on in this English class is using more descriptive words that can make a reader feel the emotions I express. I believe that learning how to use sensory imagery would assist me in my writing. One more thing that I would like to learn in this course is how to start off a sentence. My sentences sometimes vary in the beginning, but I would like to strive to make most of my sentence structures seem different. Since we have a small class, I know that there will be plenty more one on one time with the teacher to work towards the students benefit. With that extra help, our teacher will be able to provide us with constructive criticism to make better essays. Another writing style that I really enjoy is the one used by sports writers. They have a specific way to grab their audiences attention and deliver them sports information simultaneously. The word choice and structure they use grabs the attention of the reader and keeps them reading on. They also have times in their articles where suspense is built bringing varying emotions to the reader. I do not plan to become a sports writer like so, but I would like to learn their techniques in how they keep a reader drawn into their work.
ReplyDeletehttp://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-point-blank-alex-rider/
http://outofbounds.nbcsports.com/2010/07/-espn-mysteriously-pulls.html.php
When I think of writing, I am haunted with memories of sitting idly in front of a computer screen at 4:30 in the morning still trying to finish the paper that is due in 3 hours. So if procrastinating is a weakness for a writer/rhetor, that is definitely one of mine. It’s not that I can't write or refuse to write, I just take so long to articulate each sentence perfectly; so one or two sentences takes me twenty minutes. I usually have good direction and I use strong points with detailed evidence when critically writing or critiquing, but my overuse of vocabulary while trying to weave it into a scholarly argument sometimes makes my sentence structures confusing. Another reason my papers are sometimes hard to follow is because I do have so much to say, and I can't condense my thoughts well. I think continued drafting during free write sessions and outlining my papers will cut down the time it takes me to type my reports. I haven’t really had to write creatively, so I doubt I’m very good at that either, and we probably won’t get into creative writing in this course but the majority of books I enjoy have some sort of creative element to it, like the book I am currently reading, World War Z*. Those books probably appeal to me so much probably they are made into the best films, and my major is Film/Video in the Communication College. So developing my writing skills could also help me get a point across better visually. Last year, my English class was wicked difficult because of the high expectations my high-and-mighty teacher, so I first want to prove to myself that my writing is college polished, or at least how close I am to that. Further I want to really develop a commanding voice/style in my papers. Everything I have written has just been boring research and highly professional topic papers. I really want to make what I write sound more like what I say. I am almost never this uptight and serious, I really like to laugh and make others laugh, and if I could do that in a witty and sarcastic way that matches how I speak act, I’d be really happy. Watching The Daily Show with Jon Stewart* this summer and enjoying his satirizing of American society and politics made me truly admire their writers for their ability to take news coverage and turning it on itself in smart, but still easy to understand way. That is another skill I would like to improve on; making easy to understand points in an interesting way. At the end of writing my papers, I am usually confident I answered the prompt and provided a feasible thesis, but other than the teacher, I don’t think anyone would read my papers. So if I could practice and learn to cut down on my writing time, making my points clearer and more interesting, I will be very happy with my college English experience.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z
http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/tue-august-3-2010-will-ferrell
Each and every student in a creative writing course, or any other course involving writing, has the ability to be the best in the class. We all possess the same amount of creativity, but what separates one from another is his or her skill in expressing that pent up creativity. As a writer I have always fallen short during the process of putting words to paper; whether it is a quick write, journal entry, or formal report. Starting in elementary and middle school I was constantly told to vary sentence structure or split up my run on sentences as this would form a better paper. And this has followed me in to college. Writing, to me, is a struggle. As I am writing this response I cannot seem to formulate sentences to my liking and it has always troubled me as a writer. Progressing further in to a paper I do realize many of my sentences are stale and consistent. The sentence structure varies rarely and my vocabulary fails to transfer to my writing. It is not to say I do not possess any writing skills. Writing about aspects of my life is fairly simple to me, as it should be. The simplicity of memoirs, journals, diaries, and narratives comes from the absence of a so called third party. While critiques and research papers require other pieces of work which must be read, comprehended, and reported journals and such do not. There are no extra steps in doing journals and such; ideas can flow directly to the paper without being checked or cited. One of my favorite books is Perks of being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky; which is said to be a modern day Catcher in the Rye. It was an optional summer reading book for my high school as I was entering freshman. Oh how I am glad I stumbled upon it. The book is written as letters, from the main character Charlie, to another character that is never named. It is written in a very simple, but descriptive, prose. Charlie is a very quiet and observational teenager, a wallflower. And how the book is structured and written reflects this perfectly. I also believe that my style of writing was inspired by his; which can a good and bad thing. His writing is formal enough to fit essays, papers and critiques but informal enough to write texts and facebook posts without substituting u for you, 2 for any variation of to, and punctuation (which all really annoys me). On the down side his writing was very loose and not very structured. As you can see from this post I answered all, or most, of the prompt thus far but in no real structured order. When given the freedom of a blog post I must say I abuse the privilege with little thought on how and where I will answer the prompt; not to say that next time will not be better. I hope for my writing to become more precise and enjoyable from this class. Since I am going into Mechanical engineering for the next four or more years much of my writing will be for dry technical papers. I am hoping this course changes my opinion on writing courses… and I feel like it will.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perks_of_Being_a_Wallflower
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye
Throughout my life I have acquired common, as well as precise, social skills that overtime have been developed into my writing and rhetorical skills. Many things have molded them including television shows, Facebook, texting, media, as well as everyday life. As with every living being I have my strengths and weaknesses, and have proved more strengths then weaknesses by getting to the point I am in my life. Some of the strengths I have include: taking facts from research to make my point more powerful, as well as having a knack for persuasion. These are both things I excel in due to the usage of them in my everyday life. For instance, I am always trying to convince my friends to do or not do certain things and also always doing research whether it is for science or simply to figure out how to do something. One of my strengths, persuasion, relates to one of my favorite movies Inception, which the whole movie was based on convincing others to do things. Inception, although some things were unrealistic, helped me understand more of the psychological component of convincing people’s ideas through emotion. On the other hand my weaknesses include my grammatical errors and a rather minute vocabulary compared to some. Both of these things I would like to improve because I think it will help me greatly in the world to better back my point, or opinion. There are many ways I can improve my writing, including but not limited to; all of my daily conversations, texting, the internet, and most importantly this class. My daily life will help me improve because I am a very friendly and outgoing person and communicating is a great way to find out new words. Blogging can even help me by just reading some of the quotes people post and seeing how things are punctuated and also the different styles that people use to write. I think this class would help me the most out of all because it is an English class and although I am very lazy, I like to succeed. So if I am required to work and write papers I will and with time I believe my grammar and vocabulary will improve through peer review and constructive criticism. Although I may get down on myself a little now since I am not the best of writers I can just remember not to give up like one of my favorite songs, which is “Till I Collapse”, by my favorite music artist, Eminem. I can’t wait to see how my writing skills develop throughout this upcoming semester, with all of the different types of writing we will have to do, as well as writing in our personal journal. Hopefully my goals to become a much better writer will be achieved so it can help me move forward. I have many challenges left to overcome to get to my final goal of being an Orthodontist with my own practice and improved writing will help me get there.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception_%28film%29 (INCEPTION)
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/eminem/tillicollapse.html (Till I Collapse)
Early on I liked to write a lot. When I first learned to read and write I would always try to write my own books and I would read all the time. I loved the Magic Tree House series and Matt Christopher’s sports books. As have gotten older my writing has become more limited to for school, in text messages, and on Facebook posts. A lot of the things that I read now come from newspapers especially the Philadelphia Inquirer because most of the stories are relevant to me because they are about things going on in the area that I know well. Coming up with my strengths and weaknesses as a writer and rhetor was initially difficult for me because most of what I thought about was school essays, but thinking about other forms of rhetoric that I use made coming up with strengths and weaknesses significantly easier. One of my strengths is that I can be very observant. This trait allows me to more clearly recognize the exigence that I want to respond to. Clearly identifying why you are writing or what point you are trying to make is the first step and without a good idea of the purpose of your writing it is often difficult to form a strong and fluent argument. When I am unsure of the purpose of something I am writing, my writing tends to become a string of loosely related thoughts and ideas. Another thing that I think is a strength for me is my ability to find support for an argument that I am attempting to make. I think that I am often able to recognize a strong example that supports something that I am trying to say. One of my weaknesses with writing is that I have trouble writing creatively. One of my favorite shows is 30 Rock. I think that this show does a very good job of using creative and funny ways of criticizing things. I like that its criticisms are often not as obvious as shows like South Park. I really like how 30 Rock uses a lot of satire and subtle references to current events to make criticisms. Another one of my weaknesses is that I can be repetitive in my writing. My teachers’ comments on papers that I wrote in high school often involved the fact that I had said the same thing in a couple different ways often without even recognizing it. This weakness often leads to my papers and things that I write being very wordy. I would really like to improve on both of these weaknesses. I think that I struggle with creativity in my writing because I am sometimes unwilling to try new things or break away from my traditional way of writing. I think that I can improve the repetitive nature of my writing by doing a better job of proofreading my writing. I think that things like peer-review sessions in this class will be very helpful in improving in this regard. Getting other people’s opinions will help me recognize when I am too wordy and am being repetitive.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.philly.com/inquirer/
http://www.nbc.com/30-rock/video/categories/season-4/1157958/
Each and every student in a creative writing course, or any other course involving writing, has the ability to be the best in the class. We all possess the same amount of creativity, but what separates one from another is his or her skill in expressing that pent up creativity. As a writer I have always fallen short during the process of putting words to paper; whether it is a quick write, journal entry, or formal report. Starting in elementary and middle school I was constantly told to vary sentence structure or split up my run on sentences as this would form a better paper. And this has followed me in to college. Writing, to me, is a struggle. As I am writing this response I cannot seem to formulate sentences to my liking and it has always troubled me as a writer. Progressing further in to a paper I do realize many of my sentences are stale and consistent. The sentence structure varies rarely and my vocabulary fails to transfer to my writing. It is not to say I do not possess any writing skills. Writing about aspects of my life is fairly simple to me, as it should be. The simplicity of memoirs, journals, diaries, and narratives comes from the absence of a so called third party. While critiques and research papers require other pieces of work which must be read, comprehended, and reported journals and such do not. There are no extra steps in doing journals and such; ideas can flow directly to the paper without being checked or cited. One of my favorite books is Perks of being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky; which is said to be a modern day Catcher in the Rye. It was an optional summer reading book for my high school as I was entering freshman. Oh how I am glad I stumbled upon it. The book is written as letters, from the main character Charlie, to another character that is never named. It is written in a very simple, but descriptive, prose. Charlie is a very quiet and observational teenager, a wallflower. And how the book is structured and written reflects this perfectly. I also believe that my style of writing was inspired by his; which can a good and bad thing. His writing is formal enough to fit essays, papers and critiques but informal enough to write texts and facebook posts without substituting u for you, 2 for any variation of to, and punctuation (which all really annoys me). On the down side his writing was very loose and not very structured. As you can see from this post I answered all, or most, of the prompt thus far but in no real structured order. When given the freedom of a blog post I must say I abuse the privilege with little thought on how and where I will answer the prompt; not to say that next time will not be better. I hope for my writing to become more precise and enjoyable from this class. Since I am going into Mechanical engineering for the next four or more years much of my writing will be for dry technical papers. I am hoping this course changes my opinion on writing courses… and I feel like it will.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Perks_of_Being_a_Wallflower
I secretly love writing. I guess my interest in writing began when I read some of my sister’s writings. She tended to write when she was upset or stressed out and the way she was able to portray so many different emotions and feelings and thoughts in words astounded me. I had never before realized the power of words and the endless ways in which to arrange them to form a unique and personalized message. I’ve always kept writing to myself, like my own little private creative outlet. I could write down whatever I wanted and be content with knowing it was safely tucked away in a shoebox or hidden in my own separate folder on the computer. I eventually adopted my sister’s traits and began writing when I was upset or if something had deeply affected me and consistently kept these writings to myself. I like to think I am capable of portraying genuine emotion in some of my writing because of this tendency to write primarily when emotions are running high in my own life. I also hope that my vocabulary is broad enough to vary my writing and thus not lose a readers interest even though this reader is mainly me. I have only shared one of my writings once when I decided to use it for my college essay. It took a long time for me to be ready to share my personal thoughts with others that I knew, let along strangers in admission departments of colleges! I have grown to occasionally share what I have written down and value with others, however I cannot help but to hesitate when doing so.
ReplyDeleteI love reading also. I especially enjoy the author, Jodi Picoult (http://www.jodipicoult.com/). Her novels are notorious for having a twist at the ending and I think she uses words beautifully for the most part although minor typos can be found in her earlier works. I also love music. Similar to books and writings, I never am ceased to be amazed that a song can provoke so much emotion in a person. A single song can inspire a nation or bring an individual to tears. I literally listen to anything and everything from classic rock to modern pop. Although there are many songs that I think incite high emotions is the song, Unstoppable (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBlKYBZIviA) by Rascal Flatts is one that readily comes to mind. Another more current song that I think is sung with incredible strength and passion is Love the Way You Lie (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uelHwf8o7_U) by Eminem and Rihanna. Knowing both of their backgrounds with domestic abuse makes this song extremely powerful. Their voices command attention and contain infinite passion.
Rhetoric is prevalent throughout all of the examples I have listed. It is seen in our every day lives; in the books we read, the emails we send, and the music we listen to. Throughout this course I hope to improve my inconsistency regarding my writing and learn more ways and styles in which to write.
As a young student, I always enjoyed writing. It was an expressive outlet for me as well as a carefree way to pass the time. The writing assignments I had in school were considered “creative writing papers” or some sort of topic that I could basically write about anything I wanted. I had no limits or boundaries. That’s the kind of writing I really enjoyed doing. When I was younger I was obsessed with a book series called Junie B. Jones. The author was such a good storyteller and gave such vivid detail that reading those books was like watching TV for me. That author really inspired me to write stories about anything that was going on in my life with great detail.
ReplyDeleteI don’t like to be told what exactly I have to write about, especially concerning some sort of long boring novel. As I reached high school my view on writing completely changed. I no longer had separate reading and writing classes, but one English class. However this class soon turned into reading nonstop and writing a boring long paper on each novel we completed. We were given some sort of general “prompt” that usually had to do about the theme of the book. This kind of writing made me feel trapped and I became very bored in the class. I started to look at writing as a chore. Because reading has to be on the very bottom of things I enjoy to do, associating writing to reading all through high school explains my feelings towards it. This experience with writing clearly showed me that my strengths were in creative writing and my weaknesses were in writing big papers on a topic I was clearly not interested in.
A major strength I think my writing has is that I’m good with including detail. When I tell a story in person I never forget any details. This definitely comes out in my writing as well. Another strength I like to think I have is with my imagination. I can come up with almost any story in a heartbeat. My minds going a million miles a minute and I like when I can actually slow down long enough and put some of my ideas on paper.
Weaknesses are things that nobody really wants to talk about but everybody has. I have countless in my writing, but if I had to narrow it down to two I’d have to say my writing layout and confidence. Sometimes I have so many ideas while writing I forget to separate them and organize them into a well-developed paper. After I write a paper, I hate to edit it. I never know if what I have written is good. Through this course I would like to improve enough with my writing that I gain confidence in it. To do this I need to learn how to organize a paper before I write it and edit it enough to really feel that it is up to par.
One woman that has the most confidence in the world is Chelsea Handler. She has a show on E called Chelsea Lately and I love to watch it. She has to be one of the most confident woman on TV. She shows confidence in every word she speaks- she knows she’s funny and she uses that to her advantage. Watching her inspires me to be more confident in what I’m writing about.
This course can definitely help improve my writing. Maybe it’ll even help me start to like it a little more. I’m a math major, so I like numbers more than words. I like having an answer to every problem. However maybe this course could help bring me back to my “creative writing” past.
http://www.randomhouse.com/kids/junieb/
http://www.eonline.com/on/shows/chelsea/index.jsp
Ever since I have been young, I have always struggled with English. I have always worked hard to become become better at English overall. I have always been a poor speller and I have struggled with reading all my life. Even though I have had these hardships I have been a decent writer. Even though I cannot spell very well, I can word sentences well, as well as getting the proper words in the right spot to make the sentence sound its best. I feel that my grammar is good also. I feel the better grammar you have the better your writing sounds. Even though I have these strengths I am horrible in other aspects of writing. One of these is my spelling is like a fifth grader. If I did not have spell check there would be no chance of me spelling a lot of words correctly. Along with that weakness I do not feel I am strong in elaborating my writing. I am a very proper writer and I like to get to the point with my writing. I hope to improve in my weaknesses with this course. I think this course will help me with elaborating my work and help me with expanding my writing to make it even better. I also hope this course will help me become more creative with my writing and not so proper so I can write in a proper way when needed and be able to write creatively when I need to.
ReplyDelete