Lesson 5 Prompt: What I Learned About...

The prompts addressed in this post are:

What questions do you have about anything that other students might respond to?

What have you learned about the textbooks we are using for this course?

What have you learned about the instructor?

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What questions do you have about anything that other students might respond to?

I am often confused about the assignments and do not understand them (they are in desperate need of editing and revising). Asking fellow students may clear up my misunderstandings, if that is what they are.

I also wonder how the other students are enjoying learning about the argument-specific part of this course. We have spent a lot of time studying, reading, and writing arguments, and I wonder how other students are enjoying it, as I am already comfortable writing them and now I'm just learning how to write different styles of them and applying them to audiences. Do other students feel a connection to their every-day lives with their new argument-writing skills?

What have you learned about the textbooks we are using for this course?

I find Hacker's Writing Reference to be an exceptional reference book. It is clear, concise, and easy to find things in. I find it very useful to preview the chapters and pick out the headers for each section, because many sections do not directly pertain to me, such as how to reference a forum or email. Ramage's book, Writing Arguments, is also very well written. I especially like that there are many, many examples of what they ask you to do in the book. While I think Ramage supplies information that is not completely necessary, such as the history of the Socratics and Sophists, I don't mind reading the supplemental material because Ifind it very interesting. Occasionally I need to skim through her paragraphs to pick out the core of what is being said, so I don't get lost in all the supplemental writing.

What have you learned about the instructor?

Romina Kline has been interesting to work with. In all honesty, I am slightly disappointed with how hard it is to get her to clarify what the assignment instructions are telling me to do. The responses I have received were not very helpful, and pretty much just restated the instructions. I do appreciate her straightforwardness, even though I find her grading to be very harsh. That is what really makes me work hard on all my lessons, and check them over ten times before submitting them. Kline references Hacker a lot in her comments, and while I love the Hacker book for it's simplicity, I would not mind getting some personal reasons and/or feedback from Kline herself. 

-Ace

Lesson 5 Prompt: Pre-Writing Techniques

This post covers the two prompts that deal with pre-writing, idea-generating techniques: 

Which of the techniques for generating ideas for essays has been most valuable to you? Why? Give an example.

Which technique would you choose not to use again? Why?

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Which of the techniques for generating ideas has been the most valuable to you? Why? Give an example.

The  most valuable pre-writing task for me has been freewriting. A lot of the time I write essays as a free write, and then edit in evidence and switch paragraphs around during the revision process. Because I am fairly well-versed in writing arguments, I can free write a basic one and then edit it to make it a solid essay. The free write gets my brain working quickly for about half an hour or until I've completed the necessary number of words. Because it's technically just an idea-generating task, if it's not working the way I want the essay to work then I don't have to use anything but the ideas when I begin to work on the real essay. The freewriting for the first outline in Lesson 5 worked well for me. If I were to turn that into an essay it would need some major work, but the content is all there. I am working on Lesson 6 at the moment, and I attempted something different with my freewrite. I tried to get all the content out there, but leave all the connecting sentences and the reasoning out of it. Thus Lesson 6's freewrite is very short and choppy, but I'm finding it very easy to plug all the ideas into a simple argument formula.

Which technique would you choose not to use again?

I do not find the journalist's questions thought provoking or idea-generating at all. Perhaps it was just the topic I was using for it, which really didn't cater to that form of pre-writing, but I found it to be very tedious and I felt like I was limited by the who, what, where, why, and how questions. I used a topic that I am fairly knowledgeable with, so I wasn't prompted to do more research with the questions, especially because I asked the questions, so they were already coming from all the previous ideas I had about the topic. Basically, with the journalist's questions I felt like I was writing things down just to fill space on a page, but that I was only writing things down that I already knew. I generated no fresh ideas and if I were to write an essay on that topic I would have to use another method of pre-writing.

The next post will address an additional three topics.

-Ace