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
I totally agree with you. I was dreading this class too, but it turned out to be ok. It made me more comfortable with writing papers for an audience.
ReplyDeleteI can totally relate to your feelings of apprehension about writing for a public audience. At the beginning of the quarter I hated it when other peers read my writing. I had really only written for my teachers in the past. However, after blog posts, commonplace essays, and peer editing sessions during class, I no longer get a huge knot in my stomach when I think of my peers reading my writing. I think this is proof that English 110 does help its students become more confident and accomplished writers. This class taught me how to write for many different audiences, which is a very useful skill to have.
ReplyDeleteI totally understand where you are coming from. I was also dreading this course and still am. It's not that bad but I know I have to be there and I don't want to be. I don't mind writing papers in the way we had to write them. I think that by choosing a controversial topic is a good thing because it lets people have their own opinion in a course they may not like so much.
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