Future English Students

Dear English 110 students,

If you are anything like me, you are probably dreading the English 110 course you are about to begin. For me, I am not exactly a fan of writing papers and analyzing various sources, so I was anything but excited when I learned what this course was all about.

In our first day writing assignment I reflected on previous writing courses that I took during my high school years. I wrote about the very structured writing assignments we were required to do for our teacher. Coming into this course, I expected the writing to be somewhat the same as to what I did in high school. However, to my surprise, it turned out to be totally different.

Before taking this course I had not really done any public writing. In fact, it was very intimidating to even think about writing for people my age. During my first writing assignment, I expressed my anxiety about writing for an audience other than my teacher and about writing very structured and somewhat tedious analytical papers. As the year progressed, my initial thoughts about this class totally transformed. This class turned out to be one of the most insightful and informative classes that I have even taken in all my years of schooling. The analytical paper we first wrote was nothing like the type of papers we had to write in high school. Our teacher gave us a lot of guidance on how to write a paper, but for the most part we got to choose and structure our paper as we chose.

Our second larger writing assignment was to do an essay for our peers. In the beginning of the year I would have been very intimidated by this, but as the year went on I learned how to write successful papers, for any type of audience.

Overall, this course was much less painful than I anticipated it to be. I learned many skills that will greatly help me in future college courses. I wish you all good luck!

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Hanna

Changing Views

I was actually in a situation just the other day when several students here were discussing religion at Ohio State. I was sitting in my room relaxing with a couple friends of mine when suddenly my R.A busted into the room and began accusing the boys sitting on the bed of throwing apples against the hallway walls. Of course they were all denying it even though their devious expressions were clearly giving away their guilt. My R.A obviously knew the boys were guilty but she planned on sticking around until one of them would eventually volunteer to clean up the mess. One of the boys, who was actually not involved in the activity spoke up and said that he truly did not throw the apples. He went on about how he was a good Christian boy who went to church every Sunday and never told a lie in his life. My R.A not believing a single word of this story, countered with a whole argument about how every Catholic she knew was deceitful, selfish, and fraudulent. She went on to say how instead of being moral, humble, giving, and selfless individuals, all the Catholics she knew were actually lying, dishonest, hot-headed individuals, who went to church and donated to the poor just to say they did it, but never truly went on and practiced any of the Catholic ideals. It just so happened everyone sitting in the room, including me was Catholic, and immediate took offense to this very bold statement my R.A had just given.

Although, I was offended at what my R.A had just said about my own religion, I couldn’t totally disagree with her. Growing up, I attended Catholic grade school and attended church regularly with my family. I considered us pretty religious and pretty true to the Catholic beliefs and ideals. I never saw this when I was younger, but since I have gotten older I have realized that there are many dishonest, selfish and faithless Catholics in the world. I used to think that just because people attended Church, that automatically meant that they were a good and genuine human being. However, in recent years, and especially the last few weeks since coming to OSU I have observed otherwise. There are a lot a Catholics who go to church and sacrifice their lives for the good of god and are genuinely good people, but there are also people who go to church and do nothing good for themselves or others outside of that.

Since coming to college, I have realized that you don’t have to go to church every week in order to be a good person and be seen as moral in the eyes of God. I truly believe that is what you do outside of that that makes you a good person. It is the little things you do everyday, things as simple as holding the door for someone or even a simple smile that truly makes you a good Catholic and better yet a good person.