The One True English Language Sect

Basic literacy is the ability to read and write, my literacy skills began to develop while I was a small child. It all started with the bedtime stories my mother would read to be. It wasn’t until I got to school that it developed even more as teachers began to teach me how to read and write. I feel that in order to be successful you need to learn how to read and right, that’s why I took pride in learning it. I’m glad that I learned that at a very early age. I notice that to get a good grade on my writings I had to write how my teachers wanted me to write things. In the long run it did pay off because I got good grades on my papers. Obviously you can see that I had to

The art of writing is a complex and difficult process. Proper writing requires careful planning, revision, and proofreading. Throughout the past semester, the quality of my writing has evolved significantly. At first, I struggled with the separation of different types of paragraphs, and I found writing them laborious. Constant practice, however, has eliminated many of my original difficulties, and helped to inspire confidence in my skills. As a collegiate writer, my strength lies in my clear understanding of the fundamentals of writing, while my primary weakness is proofreading my own work.

After this semester of English 102, at Bristol Community College I feel that I have gained the skill to articulate what I want to convey to the reader in many ways. I don’t just look at grammatical error, but instead I look for ways to make my sentences more effective and concise. Nevertheless, I hope that this strategy will continue to help me improve my writing even further on in the future.

The Importance of Writing Badly was written by Bruce Ballenger. His intended audience are students who are victims of strict English teachers as well as the strict English teachers, themselves. In his essay, Ballenger portrays that students are more focused on being grammatically correct than the message in their essays. This is because of teachers who grade strictly on grammar errors and punctuation. Ballenger says, “A colleague of mine, an Ivy League graduate, is among the self-appointed grammar police, complaining often about the dumb mistakes his students make in their papers. I don’t remember him ever talking about what his students are trying to say in those papers.” (Page 74). Bruce Ballenger has effectively argued and persuaded his intended audience with his use of ethos, pathos, and logos.

This is the second required general core course in college­level writing. Observing the conventions of

When writing my papers in English I was never sure what topic, I wanted to write about. I rotated between two, one being “The Mistreatment of Animals in Zoos” and the second and my main topic being “Is College Worth the Cost.” When writing these papers, I noticed something about myself. I had grown as a writer compared to when I first walked into English 1100, I had some writing experience but not much my grammar lacked and I was the queen of sentence fragments. Throughout the semester during English 1100, my writing skills improved. From learning, how to format works cited page correctly to learning how to analyze a source. My writing improved wonders with each paper. My paper I, I struggled extremely with formatting issues and how to

From elementary school to high school, I was taught that my writing had to be structured and follow strict criteria. After I arrived in Mr. Mukherjee’s ENG 102 class, I was given the opportunity to express my creative freedom through words and graphical pictures. It can often be difficult and challenging to improve upon my own writing abilities unless motived with an idea in mind. When looking back on my time at ASU, I thought about the goals that I wanted to address for myself and the course goals that my instructor had set for the class. These goals include ones that I had accomplished to the best of my ability and ones that I need to address as well as improve.

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

      Additionally, another weakness that I had when coming into English 101 was that I was a selfish writer. Like Trimble said, “His natural tendency as a writer is to think primarily of himself- hence to write primarily for himself.” (Trimble, 4) I was a writer who only cared about impressing one type of audience my professor and not writing to prove a point or expand my knowledge to several other audiences. However, after writing several unsatisfying essays I had come to realize that my style of writing was too narrow and boring. In this realization of writing I discovered that what matters the most is pleasing your audience (many not one), and

In Lynne Truss’s critically acclaimed novel “Eats, Shoots and Leaves”, Truss’s only goal in life is to stop awry and erroneous grammar and punctuation, all while pointing out the humorous consequences of monstrous writing. Similarly, I tend to have the same obsession with correcting street signs and articles. I already knew I had found my favorite passage when I began reading about Lynne’s encounter with horrendous signs.

In his discussion of the comma, In Praise of the Humble Comma, Pico Iyer spares no words in describing it’s potency within the world of language and writing. Iyer makes it a point to ensure his audience may also appreciate the importance behind grammatical manners, focusing mainly on punctuation. Throughout his piece, Iyer uses a range of methods to help illustrate his purpose to his audience. These techniques include many comparisons to other hobbies or actions, allusions to past events, his sentence structure, quotes from previous authors' works, amongst an arrangement of other references, that are in some way relatable to his readers.

As a result of a disconnection of their culture, the forcefully assimilated students have reduced academic. Since these students are in an environment where English is increasingly valued, they struggle from the pressure of understanding not only the content in class, but the people around them. In the article English-Only Movement: Its Consequences on the Education of Language Minority Children, Mei-Yu Lu explains the struggle of students to learning both English and academic subjects. According to Lu, “These essential resources are made unavailable, however, when children are thrown into an English-Only situation where they are expected to learn unfamiliar content in an unfamiliar language. Without the bridge provided by their L1, their chances

Contingency and circumstance are decisive in better understanding thinkers and writers, most especially when their works are unsystematic.

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