.....filled with confidence that I was going to impress people with what I had to say. Of course, when my first assignment received constructive criticism, I reeled. Since then, I have cultivated a sense of humility and a greater realism in my approach to writing. I think more about my goals with each piece, keeping in mind my audience. If my audience is hostile to my ideas, and I am writing to persuade them, I anticipate what they might say to counteract each of my points. Then, I start the process of outlining and jotting down ideas. What I used to find annoying, restrictive, and tedious I now find to be the most enjoyable aspect of writing. When outlining and brainstorming ideas, I do not need to worry about form and style, or tone and diction. All I need to be concerned about is the veracity of my statements, the organization of my composition or storyline, and flushing out all ideas. If I outline and pre-write well, I write much better, and this is the most valuable lesson I have learned so far. When I read other peoples' work, I appreciate a logical flow of ideas and clarity often even more so than clever turns of phrase.That is not to say I do not appreciate masterful sentence construction or clever phrasing. My main point of weakness in writing is coming up with snappy metaphors. I envy the witty writers who can create meaningful analogies and metaphors and use them judiciously. I tend to fall into the trap of cliches, or I avoid metaphors altogether because I do not trust my ability to make one work. I believe that I need to practice the art of metaphor more in my writing. Since starting this course, I have become more aware of the importance of saying something a number of different ways: the metaphoric is among the most effective. I tend to write in a straightforward manner. My choice of words, my diction, can be admirable at times, but not my overall presentation. It is something I hope to work on in the future. In the meantime, I will focus on my strengths as a writer, which include not only diction, but the ability to remain stylistically consistent, grammatically correct, and succinct. If I can say something in one sentence, I will. I prefer to use as few words as possible, whereas many writers will spend a page to say what can be said in a...
In this class, I have learned how to be self-critical and cut out extraneous sentences and passages. Perhaps one of the most valuable lessons I have learned in this class is in fact how to be a strong editor.
Administrative Offices 23331 Water Circle Boca Raton, FL 33486-8540, USA Book Proposal The original coal camps that existed throughout the Appalachian Mountains from Pennsylvania to Alabama have faded into memory and kudzu-covered, rusty tracks and vacant holes. The people who worked the pits had to spend a good portion of their lives below ground, breathing coal dust and facing the dangerous task of eviscerating a mountain. It was not a job from which
Benjamin Franklin is considered one of the most important men in American history. Among his many contributions to the world were inventions such as the Franklin stove, the bifocal, and the harnessing of electricity. He is also renowned for his writings, including contributions to the United States' Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. One of his most enduring works has been his multi-volume autobiography wherein he highlights some of the
A perfect example of this is located in Chapter three. Chapter three opens with the camera zooming steadily in on a window. The shot then cuts to a shot of streetlights, establishing the time of day as early morning. Even though simply not enough of the room is exhibited to demonstrate what exactly exists within it, the shot following the streetlight is of a woman in bed, strongly suggesting it
Today, even the local gas station and supermarket use computer technology and applications that are much more advanced in their capability than the computer systems used to launch and recover the first generation of spacecraft (Evans, 2004; Kaku, 1997). Modern computer applications perform calculations and allow analyses of very high volumes of information that far exceed the capacity of direct monitoring by human operators (Larsen, 2007; Nocera, 2009). That is
Suturing in Film Theory and Other Narrative Practices On a very literal level, to suture something is to sew something back together, usually imperfectly, usually with a substance that is alien to the body that is being altered -- such as the doctor's suturing thread that stitches together an open wound. On a semiotic level, according to Jacques-Alain Miller, Miller's definition of suture (in a nutshell) is that the suturing process
Teaching Unit for an 8th-Grade Language Arts and Literature Class Contextual Factors Community, District, and School Factors Classroom Factors Student Characteristics Learning Goals and Objectives Pre-Assessments Aligned with Learning Goals and Objectives Evaluation of Pre- and Post-Assessments Criteria Used to Measure Student Performance for Learning Goals Plan for Formative Assessment to Gauge Student Progress Design for Instruction Explanation of Selected Activities: No. 1. How Content Relates to Instructional Goal(s) and b. How the Activity Stems from Pre-Assessment Information and Instructional Context Materials and
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