The Little Seagull Handbook, By Richard Bullock

A freshman college level English Composition course aims to improve students' abilities with writing, critical thinking, mechanics and usage, punctuation, grammar, and vocabulary. By studying English 101 at Luzerne County Community College, I will work diligently to improve in all of these aspects. My main focus is to develop skills specifically to create clear and concise thesis statements, strong and persuasive essays with cajolement, and to develop different perspectives on narratives and other essays. These writing skills may also improve my critical thinking and reading skills.

Handbook is a useful resource which provides ways to effectively read texts. For example, analyzing can be used to break a book down into smaller parts to further help the reader. Evaluating, on the other hand, allows many things to be considered that will assist the reader in better understanding the text. Formulating is a method used at the end of reading which can help with the conclusion and provide details about the text. According to The Little

English class has never been my strong suite. I always had to work twice as hard in English then I did in any other class. Writing paper always had me stressed and overwhelmed, I felt discouraged in my work. l never seemed to be able to get to the level I wanted to. I would try my hardest and paid attention in class, but when it came to writing the paper none of that seemed to help. I think that my experience in English Composition 1 has helped gain and grow in some areas, but I don’t think that it highlights a well-written college essay. Some elements that I worked to improving was introduction paragraphs, tone, style, and thesis statements.

English Composition I has developed my style of writing and my skills analyzing and researching topics to write a piece about a topic. Throughout the course, I got better at analyzing articles and pieces to get the meaning of the topic. With that improved skill I was more able to use the information given from the text and install it into my essays, with proper citation if needed. Before taking the English Composition course, I was not one to organize my essays in an ordeal order to clearly state the point of the work. Now with taking the course, I have learned to organize my essays, examine research for a topic, and develop an essay with proper mechanics, and revising skills. In writing my personal, review, analytical, and cultural

While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.

To wrap up an idea/ give final thoughts and explain the reason for the essay

The writing handbook I use is The Little Seagull Handbook. The specific area I see myself making the most mistakes with punctuation is comma splices. Sometimes I place commas in sentences where I think they are supposed to be, but really they are not. I think punctuation is probably the most common mistake I make when writing a paper. I changed my second goal to providing more details and examples in my writing. I thought I expanded pretty well on important specifics in my papers, but I noticed there are still some parts where I do not provide sufficient detailed information. An example of this would be not providing enough details on my goals I make; I am striving to meet this goal by the end of the course. The way I see myself determining

The following video tutorial gives instruction on writing an effective conclusion to an essay: http://polaris.umuc.edu/ewc/tutorials/conclusions/

So, you’ve got Bywater’s English 1010 class and you don’t know what to write about? Don’t worry, you are not alone. Although Professor Bywater’s class may seem intimidating, it truly is one of the most rewarding classes you will take at DSU, and it will help you throughout your college career when it comes to writing papers. Professor Bywater’s class comes with an amazing textbook titled Rules of Thumb and a checklist, or Writing Guide 101, and this checklist will save your life and your paper. Using transition sentences between paragraphs, understanding pronouns, and using the correct point of view are the most important points in Professor Bywater’s checklist, and I will show you the correct usage and implementation of all three. Read and retain the following information and you will succeed in English 1010 and gain the skills you need to succeed in college making your life, and your papers, easier.

Chin, Beverly Ann (2000). The role of grammar in improving student’s writing. Retrieved from http://www.uwplatt.edu/~ciesield/graminwriting.htm

While attending public schools english teachers did not begin teaching students the proper method to create a essay until the sixth grade. I never understood writing, because the stress of the state test, the teachers only taught what will earn students a successful score. In lectures, we learned to create and revise an essay. The teacher trusted student to be accurate in their corrections. By analyzing Richard Straub’s document, I have gained knowledge on where to put place my comments, how to criticize an essay and goals a responder should encounter.

Throughout the semester, I have gained skills necessary for understanding and utilizing logic while writing. I am now aware that for any writing to be scholarly, it must possess an introductory section, a body and a conclusion section. Further, I am now able to understand as well as utilize most of the basic techniques useful in pre-writing, revision and editing. Through writing the “downloading from torrents” paper, I acquired skills in word processing, sentence elements, and punctuation. Further, I developed some special skills in writing a website analysis which is a critical aspect in contemporary learning as argued by Flateby (p 182). As the semester folds, I believe that I have gained the prerequisite skills in writing and critical thinking. However, I need to improve much on some of the common problems in writing that seems to disturb me especially grammar.

Over the course of this past semester, my ability to write has improved tremendously. Prior to undertaking this course, my expertise in writing was not as fine-tuned as it should have been. I had never previously been enrolled in a class specifically tailored to writing-- which was quite clear. Upon reading my past works, it becomes apparent that my writing style consisted of fluff, small words, and inconsistently structured sentences. These problems have, for the most part, been remedied with the coursework I have tackled in College Writing. Rather than long, drawn out papers that take an eternity to reach the primary point, my recent work is much nicer in terms of composition and grammar. I credit these improvements to the three primary

Third but not least, the conclusion provides an almost mirror image of the introduction, wrapping up the arguments with a restatement of the thesis of your essay. I call this the bottom burger bun or in other words the conclusion. Holding it all together is the bottom bun of the hamburger or the conclusion to sum up all the key points of interest. The conclusion sentence should be interesting by giving it a call to action. As you can see a hamburger is easy to make like writing is not as hard as you think. Writing is very simple to do as preparing a hamburger.

Since beginning to write papers in English class, I have had countless successes and failures. While many of my English classes have taught me how to improve my writing, I have not learned very much in others. My most recent English class was last year, my sophomore year. My class was particularly undersized; therefore, it gave each student the opportunity to have additional individual attention. Throughout the class I experienced high points, weaknesses, and even difficulties that I never overcame. Overall, my writing skills improved, but only marginally.