Sarah's English 1101 Online Blog

      I believe high school writing is much simpler than college writing and doesn't require complex thinking or analogy. For me being taught how to write an essay in high school was, at the time a hassle, but compared to college it's as simple as simple can get. That's not to say college writing is the hardest thing in the world if anything it has advanced my writing skills and I've learned how to improve my writing to go from writing like a high school freshman to an undergraduate in college.      In high school, you're taught the basics of what an essay is and the different types of essays like, argumentative, informative, and expository. They teach you a simple technique called RACE to help organize your essay. and along the way, we are introduced to MLA and how to cite evidence to back up any claim you had within your paper. For the most part, teachers did not allow students to write in the first person to seem formal and to avoid "I" and "yo...

    In  Janet Boyd's essay Murder! Rhetorically Speaking she explains the strategies of rhetoric and what it means right off the bat saying, "...that choosing how to express your meaning is every bit as important as the message itself, which is really what rhetoric is." (87). I believe her persuasion in explaining strategies was good enough for me to understand. She uses a little mini assignment about students tapping into their inner detective and how to report a crime scene using a prompt of "Who, What, Where, When, and How". Using this analogy, she was essentially saying that we should use these rhetoric detective skills to try and report what we are reading, and it can help to depict essays and even our own essays. 

    When it comes to a logical argument it mainly consists of using informative logic toward a claim to support that claim. How I use logical argument in my essay by saying, " Being a psychologist allows students to understand the different kinds of personalities and how the brain operates ." By saying this our premise of psychology is that it's the study of understanding the human brain and that it specializes in evaluating people's thinking and behavior therefore the logical argument works. In Rebecca Jones's essay  Finding the Good Argument OR Why Bother With Logic? she states, " I think of inductive reasoning as a stacking of evidence. The more particular examples you give, the more it seems that your conclusion is correct" (164). I approach a persuasive/argumentative essay with a bunch of informative evidence to support my claim to prove the logic so the reader can trust that it's not all speculation but hard facts. In a way, it's to seem mo...

       To break down things we see we use rhetorical analysis to find the true meaning and understand what the text is trying to say. Rhetorical is in the form of a triangle with other things surrounding that triangle, consisting of the writer, the audience, and the subject. In the middle of the triangle is the purpose and outside of the circle is the context. With this, we can use the triangle to understand my essay on testing anxiety.     The purpose of my essay is to talk about how testing anxiety can stop you from being successful in school and proper solutions on how to control the anxiety with the subject being about some threats that college students struggle with when it comes to excelling academically. The audience is like I've stated college students and the context is about this informative essay trying to bring light on testing anxiety as one of the many things that prevent college students from passing classes. The writer is me who also struggl...

Whenever it comes to writing an essay or reading an essay, being able to connect with the reader is key. With that being said writers have their own way of trying to present their purpose such as using quotes, citing, paraphrasing to communicate to the audiences. Mike Bunn is an example and uses outside resources to seem relatable and not as formal to his readers, given when he himself had to read and would look at the reader's every word to understand the whole context of what was being said. His idea on using outside sources helps readers think as if they were the reader themselves to understand the process of how a writer wrote their paper and in return can help them write better as well. The technique I see that Bunn uses is painting a picture for the audience by explaining when he worked at a theatre or how reading never really intrigued him, little things like this make us have some background information about the reader and how he came to writing. He also cites from his stu...

      My essay is heavily based on test anxiety and how to find solutions and also inform people who aren't aware that it's a real problem. I decided to write this essay since I too also have test anxiety, so it was a good way to research and inform myself and others. This essay is also following the communications triangle and the main keys of the triangle.      The communications triangle has elements consisting of writer, reader, subject and test. These elements are sort of your guideline as to what you're writing and how you'll present what topics, biases and statements you want to convey to your audience. The main point is to communicate your subject to your audience using a certain text and in this case my essay is about me communicating to my classmates about test anxiety, by writing in MLA format. My purpose is to inform and bring awareness towards test anxiety and how it can affect one's academic performance and a...