Blog # 9

 We have learned many things in this class. The goal of; Engage a topic in which the student explores writing as a means of self-discovery, establishes a voice appropriate to the topic selected and rhetorical context, and produces a text that is designed to persuade the reader of the student’s commitment(4), for this class was very rewarding. We got the chance to use creativity and express our self by using a blog. For me, it was the first time I have done something like this on the internet. It was even hard for me to keep a dairy as a kid. The blog helped the students of the class and I to achieve this goal in an appropriate way.

I have never been taught the correct way of doing research correctly so that the author will get credit. The goal of; Understand the process of research, both in the library and through electronic media, and develop effective research strategies (6), helped me a lot and will keep helping throughout my career as a student and beyond. I learned how to effectively find a good website because of its credentials and such. I enjoyed doing the argument paper because it gave me a challenge. At the moment I am not sure how I did, but I hope I did well. We also learned this in the critical analyze because we need to cite what we used from sources which I forgot to do and will be fixing to get a better grade.

At first when I read this goal; Recognize the importance of writing as essential to inquiry, learning, thinking, communicating, life-long learning, and as a career skill(10), I pondered on it for a moment because I never wrote anything down unless it had to do with school, for a grade. I thought if maybe everyone in history only did this we would not have such an enriched civilization that we have today. Writing is very important for everyone young and old. I think that writing defends what we are, have been, and what might be. Writing has always been around in some form.

One of the most important things I learned helped meet this goal; Utilize various invention, drafting, and revising/editing strategies to meet the purposes of different writing situations, materials available to the student, and length of time available for the task(3). Before writing a paper the writer needs to make an outline so they can map out what they want to cover in there writing. In post-English class, when I got an assignment of an outline I always waited until the paper was complete then write the detailed outline. I learned that the outline is to help the writer not to help the students’ grade go up. I learned many ways to draft out an outline for a paper and how to “free write” so I can get ideas of my paper.

 We used this goal for a lot of papers; Select, evaluate, and interact effectively with sources, subordinating them to the student’s purpose and creating confidence that the sources have been fairly represented and acknowledged with academic integrity, particularly in summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting statements or reproducing audio-visual materials (7). If I am recalling correctly I believe that every paper that we wrote in class was helping us to evaluate and to fairly represent the author in an appropriate way. The main paper that comes to mind is the paper that we wrote with another student from the class. I thought that was a good paper to start out with, with another student we learned to positively share what we evaluated and we could see what we missed from another point of view.