Looking In The Past: Rhetorical Analysis

Writing is involved in the mechanics everything people do including school studies, employment applications, and recording thoughts. However, even though writing is so important and commonly used, unlike speaking or picking up the lyrics to one’s favorite song, writing needs to be learned in order to be done properly. While the New Dorp school system is a far to common example of a underfunded school that lacked in the writing department even after its reforms despite making real progress, I was fortunate enough to learn from a high school that provided me with the highest standard of writing teaching. By having weekly assignments, personalized meetings, and difficult readings, my high school graduates leave with the skillset needed to write well in all aspects of their

Bridger Haffey Narrative for US101 Throughout the course of this class I have come to realize that involvement and participation is essential to my success in this course. Not only is participation a large amount of my grade, but it is also a means to understanding the material that we discuss in class. Personally, I learn best when I ask questions and get involved in finding connections between themes and ideas. This is not only true for discussion, but also for classes like calculus where it is very easy to fall behind unless I am fully engaged.

So far high school has taught me the basic knowledge that I will need in life like how to solve problems which do not have straightforward or easy answers, and how to work effectively either with others or alone. In most of my classes critical thinking and analysing is the way to solve problems. I have learned to appreciate the importance of communication through effective speech and debate. High school has taught me many skills that will be helpful later in my career of work ethics, social behavior between peers and leadership. However, the thing I benefited from the most in high school is collaborative working.

As I have learned how to conduct writing conferences, I know that the words that I choose to use will greatly impact my student’s learning. Questions such as, “What are you doing as a writer today?” will challenge my students to see themselves as writers and be able to think through their process of writing. (25) In addition, while teaching number talks, I have asked the question, “How did you figure that out?” (31).

I have taken some classes on writing and have improved my writing drastically over the years. As with everything, there is plenty to improve on. My high school was a college preparatory school, so we did countless papers. One of my strengths is to be able to come up with a paper fairly quickly, but I do need to improve in some areas. Things I should improve on are word choice and sentence fluency.

In my portfolio you will see an array of my work and hopefully the progress I have made throughout each piece of writing. The first essay you will see is my first piece of writing I created for this class. As you will notice it was very brutal. I had a lot of dead words, grammar mistakes and punctuation mistakes.

One of the important resources I have discovered throughout the semester is a writing specialist. Because of the student support service program (SSSP) I am in, they provide a writing specialist I can use. Angie has helped me a lot revising my papers and helping me think of ideas. Whenever I don 't have time to go see Angie for assistant, I have my roommate revise my paper just to have someone look

I might have lost the school spelling bee but I’m still keen in spelling and learning new words everyday. But that specific day had left me traumatized. From that day forward I felt uncomfortable sharing my literature, expressing myself, participating in academic events or something as simple as talking.

Each essay I wrote took me several time to write, several drafts which show that I have improve every time I do the drafts to write a perfect masterpiece. I learned a lot of skills and techniques this quarter, which has helped me to improve and progress my writing skills for the future. I will remember the skills, techniques, and tips that professor gave us in this English class for my higher education. For example, all the time that I went to visit professor Sapozhnikov office hours to receive help on my out-of -class essays has helped me to improve, grow, and progress in my writing skills as a writer. Some of the significant changes I have made as I was progressing and growing were to develop a strong thesis to help support my claims as I write my essays, such as facts, observations, illustration, and examples.

When I first started Dual English Comp I was narrow-minded and stubborn. This course opened up my mind to English but also taught me how to write a successful college essay. Before this course I had no idea which kind of punctuation to use or when to put a comma before but or and. When I look back on my first paper I wrote for English Comp I can definitely see a difference between my first piece of work and one of my last essays I wrote and how much I have improved. My initial goal when I first came into this class was to get an A no matter what.

In The View from 80, Cowley claims that aging and becoming an elderly member of society can be a brutal and unforgiving process. In his introduction, he compares aging in our society to the tradition of killing elderly members the Ojibwa tribe with a tomahawk. Cowley uses literary devices such as lists, personal accounts, anecdotes and imagery to convey his argument to the reader. His writing is effective due to the fact that he includes the three vices of aging and taps on the physical and psychological shortcomings that older people are reminded of by themselves and by society. He also admires people who see old age as a challenge.