1. Dear Friend,
This semester I am taking English 1102. This class reminds me a lot of AP English in high school, but it varies in many ways, too. Many of the things I've learned in this class are the basics about writing, specifically the writing process. Throughout the half-semester - just like English 1101 - we learned about different genres: exploratory essays, annotated bibs and a three-sided research/exploratory essay. Another thing we learned was to open up in our writing, to take risks and actually enjoy writing. And of course, a big part of this class is the reflective side to our writing. For each draft we had to write a cover letter, which helped us think about the writing process. Doing a blog assignment also caused us to think about the writing process as a whole and some of our later assignments caused us to think reflectively. All of these things are extremely important to becoming a good writer. By actually thinking about what you write, instead of doing it just to do it and get a grade, it actually makes you think more and you can surprise yourself with what you come up with.
Sincerely, Jake
2. Annotated Bib Reflection:
I wrote this piece as a starting point for the rest of the semester (for the 3-sided essay and the argumentative essay). Of course I'll have to do more research during the writing process, but the biggest part of my work is done. The audience of my piece is anyone who is interested in becoming healthier, or anyone who is interested in exercise in general. This piece was extremely easy to write. After I got started, the the hardest part was reading through all of the sources and picking which ones to use. I've had plenty of practice with bibliographies and the only thing on top of that was just summarizing it and figuring out whether it was credible or not. Also, because it was structured, i had no trouble figuring out how I wanted/needed to write it (unlike the first essay). In the revisions, I didn't change very much; the only thing i changed was making the annotations a little longer and adding the few sentences of why it was credible. This was my first time ever doing an annotated bib so I learned how to do them, but other than that, it was fairly straight-forward. If someone were to read this, they would learn about what the sources i chose were about and would have a better understanding of my topic in general. The only thing that I need to revise about my annotated bib is putting the sources in alphabetical order. (It completely slipped my mind after I added the final 3 sources!)
3. I think the book Peace, Butter & Jelly was a good book for us to help "jumpstart" the semester. If you do the same theme (or a similar theme and/or do a similar assignment), then this would be a good book to use.
4. Finding out how I
want to write an assignment
is the hardest part.
