Future English 110 Student

Dear Future English 110 Student,

It has been brought to my attention that you are considering or are taking English 110 in the upcoming quarter. This class, while challenging, is fun, and very helpful. I thought I was a good writer and then I took English 110. This is when I realized that I was a good writer, but there was a lot of room for improvement. In this class you deal with topics that you never think about when you write. These topics include tone, audience, ethos, logos, pathos, and whether your writing is timely, compelling and relevant.

While this class is fun and helpful, you will find yourself challenged in this class. This is by no means an easy A. The teachers know that you have better to offer, so they will push you until they get the best work you can do, and until that happens, you will continue to be pushed. You will not only be pushed to show what you already know, but they push you to include what you are learning in class. They know what they are teaching in class will improve your writing, so they really like to see what you are learning in class to be incorporated into your papers. This was one of my problems on my first paper. The first paper was about taking a primary source and analyzing this source. I wrote the paper, and was disappointed in my grade. I wrote a quality paper, and was confused by my grade. I set up a meeting with the teacher, and after that meeting I understood what I did wrong. I wasn’t applying what we learned in class to the paper, and at that same time I realized how much better my paper would have been if I had incorporated what I learned into the paper.

The other interesting part about this class is the public writing. You are given several chances in this class to write for a public audience and also read and analyze public pieces. This is particularly interesting because most of what you’ve written your whole life has been for teachers, not a public audience. You have to learn to tailor your writing so it is appropriate, and interesting to the public. This class gives you the opportunity to do this.

The bottom line? If you are going to take English 110 be prepared to have fun, learn a lot, be challenged, and become a better writer.

Blog Post #4

This is a very interesting prompt. It was very different analyzing readers comments opposed to analyzing the actual article and it’s contents. The articles I choose were both about sports and how it affected society as a whole, this corresponds to my ARP paper. The first article I found was all about sports and commerce, and how it affected society. It talked about the money that sports brings in, and even though sports was not originally intended to make money, society places such an importance on sports that people choose to exploit it as a business opportunity. The author also talked about how this was wrong for people to us sports as a major income source because it is important to society, and essentially people are exploiting society for money. He argued that this was wrong to do. The great thing about this article, is that it is very controversial, therefore the comments had a wide range of opinions.
There were several things I noticed about these comments. The ones that were the most influential had several defining characteristics. First of all, comments that respected the views of the author were more influential. No one appreciates a comment that is disrespectful, it automatically discredits what that person has to say. Where as when the person respects the authors opinion, it shows not only maturity, it also shows intellectual ability. It shows that the person can understand the authors point of view, and just has the ability to argue against that point of view. Second of all, they present their arguments in a rational, logical way. They provide a step by step, detailed train of thought, were the reader can easily follow them and understand their perspective.
The next article I found was more focused on coaches, and how they can affect the players lives. The author thought that the measure of a successful coach should be how many players return the next year. His logic was that a coaches job is to make sure sports is a positive experience, and that can be shown by the number of returning kids. However, this is also controversial, many people believe that it is the values and the lessons the coach instills in the kids. This created controversy again on the posting walls. This time I noticed some other things that were interesting. People who let passion take over their post, don't make a very convincing argument. While passion shows they care, sometimes passion blinds the person to the facts, and they don’t even use facts, or logic. The other thing that noticed was that people who put one sentence responses such as “I agree with the article” or “that is a good point”, they don’t bring anything useful to the conversation, they do no analysis. It just interrupts the flow of the conversation.
These observations I made were very interesting and show me some examples of what to do, and what not to do in my blog post.