Skills

Overall, my writing skills have improved. Before when  writing a paper I would put everything that popped into my head while writing into the paper. Now I really think about what I am writing and I am not afraid to revise my paper as many times as it takes to get a good finished product. My feelings about writing have not really changed, I still enjoy writing I just do it a little better now.

Revision, revision, revision

For this assignment, we had to pick a piece of writing that we have already written in class and then revise it into a new piece of writing. I took an in class writing and turned it into a narrative. It was on my trip to Disney World. I am really glad that I decided to use this as my prompt. It is fun to write about and I enjoy writing it. The most important revision that I made was to change my introduction. My first two draft began with my saying how it was bitter sweet, because no on in my family went on the trip with me, it was just friends. Then ofter the peer editing in class, everyone that read my paper was unsure with how that introduction fit in with the rest of my writing. In the end I went with just focusing on how great the trip was and not the bitter sweet factor that played into it.

Revision Piece

For my revision paper, I decided to rewrite about a vacation that I took. The vacation that I am writing about is a trip to Disney World that I went on with some of my friends from school. The reason I thought that this would be a good piece to revise into a narrative, is because I can remember it so well and I thought that it would just be fun to write about my trip. I knew that that stories would keep readers interested and it would also be a paper that I would look forward to finishing!

Literacy and Writing

Literacy and being able to write are important to my family. I don't really think that it is especially important in any way, except that we need it to communicate. My family is fortunate enough to all be educated, so it's not a situation in that we have members of our family who are illiterate. It is more of a concept that is just expected and I guess in some ways taken granted for.

Short Project

For my short project I am doing a mass mailing that will reflect upon why music programs count. It is designed to show parents the different things that music has to offer so that they can help guide children towards  being in music programs. I think that the project overall is going well. I put in colorful pictures and text. It makes it seem more realistic and approachable. I am printing it in color and on card stock to make it look as real as possible!

Short project

For my short project I chose to do an ad. One that would go out in a mass mailing informing parents about music education.  The way that I am setting my project up is to get people excited about music education. I put in some real pictures from marching bands. It has repeating words to try to get the reader's attention and I also tried to put in some imagery so that peopel really thought about what was presented before them. Hopefully it turns out good in the end!

Research paper is almost done!

I think what I am most proud of in this essay is writing it in APA Style. Just because I never have before, so it was cool to do something different. I thought that finding the full text articles not available on google was the hardest part of the research, but I think that I successfully was able to do this! What I learned the most about myself as a researcher doing this paper was that I am very specific when it comes to how I want to do things. I think that my entire household will be excited when this paper is finished, because I have inhabited the computer room as my own private office.

Important Revising

The research paper that I am currently writing has to be written in APA format. Right now the only thing APA about my paper would be the citations. I haven't really broken my paper up into the way that an APA paper needs to be written in. So, as a result, my current very important revisions to my paper are to actually get in written the way that it is suppossed to be written!

Academic writing vs. non academic writing

I don't think that I really enjoy academic writing. When I was younger English was always my favorite school subject, but now I find that to be less true. I wonder if this is a result of the type of writing that I have to now do in school. When you are younger, generally you are allowed to turn any piece of writing into something fun. Now I just feel like it is hassle. It is just one more thing that needs to get done after going to class, work, and everything else that a typical day brings. It is really hard to find the fun in writing when you are so dependent on the grade that will eventually be attached to it!

Research

When I am researching a topic for a paper, it takes me forever. I will go to the library, email teachers, look through pages of databases (most often infotrac). I try to look at everything I can and I am not very fast at sorting through information. It always stresses me out, because I want to make sure that what I am looking for is the same thing that my teacher would be looking for. In the end it usually works out right, but it is not a nice clear-cut road to get there. In the complete opposite direction of scholarly writing research, when I just want to know a fast fact I will go straight to google, press the "I feel lucky" button and hope for the best!

Argument essay reflection!

Overall I struggled the most with having enough to put into my essay. I just felt that there was so much information that wasn't important. Looking back at on it I could probably have chosen a better audience to have written to. One thing that I did do in my essay that helped tie in my audience was that I kept telling them that I have been in their shoes and know what it feels like to have to be in middle schooler and have to write that first research paper. In future essays what I need to work on the most would be to make my essays "bloom" I thought that I had a lot of good ideas, but I also felt that they were just thrown into the paper and not really developed any further. It's just a skill that will hopefully get better as I practice more writing!

Revising

The biggest problem with my letter was that it didn't really appeal to my audience. I am writing it to Middle School students that are writing their very first research paper and might want to know if they should use Wikipedia as a source. So it is hard to develop a letter that doesn't make me sound like I only have a middle school education when writing to Middle Schoolers. What I trying to so to solve this problem is define a lot of what would be new vocabulary to them within the context of my letter. Hopefully it all will come together by Friday morning before 8:30!

Essay #1

I think that what I am struggling most with this essay is the length. I am finding it hard to balance the sincerity of my letter with making it longer. I know that there are ways to add more depth to my paper, but I am finding it hard to figure out a way that I like. I guess am have until Friday, so I will just keep on attempting to create a legitimate way to increase the length of this letter.

Why do I have to write about this. . .again?

Standardized tests! They are probably the very worst thing about high school. Not only are they monotonous, but the writing portion seemed to be one of two topics: Patriotism or vending machines in school. I feel that I have written about thirty essays on whether schools were should be allowed to have vending machines in the building. With every year that I was forced to write a paper on this subject my opinion never changed. I guess that with every year my arguments got stronger but I still hated writing on the subject!

On my own!

There are an incredible amount of people out there in the world that are willing to teach their trade. They take pride in the fact that someone would want to learn from them as opposed to someone else, with comparable ability. There is, however, a double edged sword for this scenario in which people want to learn that trade on their own in in hopes of impressing the person that is willing to teach them.

For as long as I can remember, my grandma has been trying to get me into sewing. It would be something that we could do together, despite the fact that we are already very close and do almost everything together. I knew how much this meant to her, so I decided to teach myself how to sew. Teaching myself to sew was not quite as easy as I thought. The first "job" I did was repair a button for my brothers pants, the button apparently fell off at an inconvient time, sorry Shane! After a few more practice rounds, though, my ability improved and I showed my skills to my grandma, I don't think that she is very impressed, but she is very proud!