Sam Brown

This is so true I always go off topic when writing my essays. I need to get better at staying on topic and having a point that I keep throughout the whole essay. 

I can use the writing process for projects, to outline and brain storm what i’m going to do. Then to check my work I can revise and read over everything i’ve written. This process can be used for many classes and projects, to help you succeed.

The papers and essays have been the most challenging for me because I tend to go off-topic and have a weak thesis. The thesis is very hard for me to create within my papers. My writing has improved by being more specific within my paragraphs and getting right to the point. I have also improved my understanding of rhetorical analysis and how to use ethos, logos, and pathos.

In the article “The problem with telling sick workers to stay home”  my counter-argument would be to write about how workers should stay home no matter what to protect their co-workers and the customers that come in. Then to go against the counter-argument I would talk about how most of the people that have covid don’t show any symptoms so they wouldn’t know they were spreading it and also would put that it’s harder for low-wage workers to take time off when they have a family to provide for. All of these points are pathos because most of these points make the reader feel sad and upset for the families. This targets the audience of workers, that work in a populated environment.

It is important to evaluate your sources because some sources could be untrue or biased. Evaluation of your sources will help you make sure they are correct and true. The most important thing I learned from Evaluating Sources is to scan the article to see if there are any red flags within the article. Red flags may mean that the source is not credible and you should not use it as a source.This will change how I read or think about an article because it will help me notice the red flags within an article and know if the source is credible.  From this information I will look for sources I know are credible such as PBS and History channel, and Britannica. This helped me realize how many unreliable sources there are and how to know if they are correct.

Format- This article has a video attached to it by CNN talking about this subject, there are spaces between the words to make it easier to read, includes headings to each topic, and has ads throughout the article.

This image helps me understand how important wearing a mask is and staying 6 feet apart because someone can be asymptomatic and still give you covid without them knowing.

I chose “A sentence is much more than it’s literal meaning. It is a living line of words where logic and lyric meet”(Moran) This stuck out to me because great writers use this piece of advice to keep the audience intrigued and guessing to what going to happen next. The author quotes “And into that gate they shall enter, and in that house they shall dwell, where there shall be no Cloud nor Sun, no darkness nor dazzling, but one equal light … ” (Moran) This phrase is full of allusion and it holds the reader’s attention and keeps them guessing on what’s going to happen next. A lot of good writers use this to keep their book or short story interesting. From this, I learned that allusion is a huge part of the writing world and it is a good thing to put in my essays in the future. Allusion gives the text character and could mean different things based on who is reading it.

I honestly don’t like peer review I don’t personally like other students reading my work, I just think it’s weird but I do like that it gives the paper a second set of eyes. This will help me because I tend to go off track in my essays and papers. I don't like when they try to change my argument of my paper, because it will throw my paper off track.

In the article “How ‘vaccine nationalism’ could block vulnerable populations' access to COVID 19 vaccinations” the author makes a good argument. By using logos, ethos, and pathos to persuade their argument. By using statistics, credible health information , and telling the audience how this will hurt many individuals in poor countries. This helps the author persuade the audience by the three rhetorical appeals.  

Some things about this article that surprised me were that there are 1.9 billion websites, 3.5 billion google searches everyday and 350,000 tweets every minute. It’s crazy to think that the internet would have such an effect on the human population. I thought these techniques were very informational. The ones that I thought would impact my writing the most are knowing your audience, following the inverted pyramid, sticking to an active voice, and having scannable text. Knowing your audience is very beneficial, it's who you're directing your website to, by knowing them you can direct your text to a certain age group or lifestyle. Following the inverted pyramid is useful because most people have a short attention span, with knowing this website’s audience putting the important information at the top of the page and the narrow information at the bottom will benefit your website or paper tremendously. This will help me better know how to organize my papers and essays. Sticking to an active voice will impact my writing by making my paper sound more interesting and make it easier to read. Having scannable text will affect the audience so much, by having white space, bulleted list, and sections the reader will be able to read the text so much easier just by how it’s organized. These techniques are important because they will help your essays evolve into something that is easily readable and beneficial for the audience to get information.

Looking back over my writing progress from project one, my pre-writing process was just me writing what I wanted to say in my paper. I put everything I was thinking on paper. Brainstorming was difficult just because I haven’t thought about how writing has influenced my life, before this project. I just thought about how I have grown as a writier and how writing has affected my life. I outlined it by explaining how my relationship with writing would get better by the time I made it to college. My revision process was just reading over it and making sure it made sense. The brainstorming process was most useful, it helped me get my thoughts together and on paper. I struggled with the outlining process just because it was hard for me to structure my paper to where it would make sense to others. I didn’t have much thought on this subject until now, it was difficult for me to remember my experiences with writing. I would like to have a more structured outline for project two.

Someone who has negatively influenced my reading and writing is, my senior year ap lit teacher. She would teach us and grade a completely different way. I had no understanding if what I was doing was right or not. It affected me negatively because it made me struggle and always question if I was doing the assignments right. We would also discuss the material in class, which I was fairly comfortable with. At the end of class she would give us our assignment, but the assignment would have nothing to do with what she taught us in class. This would leave me stressed and confused, this made me debate my strength of reading and writing.