Final Blog Post Assignment

    My writing has greatly improved since the beginning of the semester; due to the time I spent learning in this English 1010 class. Something that was beneficial was how we were required to write a blog thus, we were able to receive a lot of practice writing. The informative paper also helped me learn to write a flowing essay. Often times, I find that my weakness in writing is that I can’t completely consolidate all my ideas into one cohesive thought on paper. With the blog I was able to learn to research a topic and then properly formulate a summary paragraph. Being able to write proper paragraphs improved my writing immensely. And finally with the many lessons in class and practice with the assignments; I was able to write a proper argumentative essay.  I found that because of new background knowledge that it was easier for me to write my final essay. All of the skills I have acquired in this class will help me with my future college essays.

    Exploring Big Ideas was the title of the blog I wrote for this semester. I took a risk making my topic very broad, but it allowed me to review all kinds of interesting materials. This assignment was effective because it required us to write twice every week. Everyone knows that the best way to get better at something is to practice; this blog was my constant practice. One of my first posts was titled, “Why I should be President.” I began with this topic because it reviewed one of my biggest ideas. I discovered while writing this entry, that I could write about how I perceive a vision or a dream in a way that was entertaining or interesting to read. We learned in class about using attention getters so that the reader would be hooked or interested in what we had to say. I tried to use many of the literary devices we researched about in class to make it more interesting and creative. Also the literary devices such as: allusion and metaphor where helpful in formulating a deep idea. These literary devices helped me learn how to convince a reader, that what I had to say would provide insight and value.

    For the informative paper I based my topic with an overall scientific view, on the question of; where big ideas come from? Something I discover to be to my disadvantage is the large topics I pick for my essays. I learned in a class discussion that topics are like a box that all of our topics within our writing must fit. For an example I will use the topic sentence for my informational essay titled, Origins of Influential Thought. “Unintentionally the misconceptions have been made, that big ideas easily come only to the naturally intelligent from random thoughts. In reality big ideas can come to anyone who has a personal drive to put forth effort by using specific techniques. Drawn from the lives of great scientists and inventors, this essay will explore the truth of where big ideas come from.” I have outlined in my thesis or claim all of the materials that will be reviewed in my essay. I talked about identifying misconceptions, discovering where big ideas come from, and about the insights found in the lives of scientists and inventors. By consolidating what I am going to talk about I then had a road map to help me write my essay.

Picking a topic for my argumentative essay was the most difficult part of this assignment. I originally was going to write about the issues with teaching the Big Bang Theory in schools; but I found the topic too hard to initially research and understand let alone find enough solidified evidence to write about. I finally chose to write about somewhere along the lines of the difficulties surrounding the Common Core State Standards. However, because I now had limited time and allot of miscellaneous evidence articles, I in a way wrote this essay backwards. Instead of starting with my introductive paragraph I started by separating out the evidence and then writing specific isolated paragraphs. After I had all my evidence written and separated into different arguments; I then tied them all together for an argument against the Common Core. By going backward I knew exactly what my thesis statement needed to contain in order to properly write about the issue. The added advantage I discovered about this unconventional form of writing is that I had more than enough to write about. I didn’t have to worry about having enough to argue about, and was able to unintentionally exceed the seven page goal.

Through the course of the semester my writing has improved within my ability to write proper fluent thoughts, flowing essays, and concise ideas. Thank you Professor for a great college class!