In the article ‘Why Kids Can’t Write’, Dana Goldstein, an education writer for The New York Times, reports on how teachers are avoiding basic grammar and writing skills in the classroom and how some teachers are going to do to change that. Judith C. Hochman, Founder of an organization called the Writing Revolution, displayed examples of students work. She says, “It all starts with a sentence.” Hochman focuses on the fundamentals of grammar but many educators are less concerned with sentence-level mechanics and more concerned about children drawing inspiration from their own lives for their writing. According to the most recent study done by the National Assessment of Educational progress three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency…
The writing expected from college courses is one that most are unfamiliar with. Although students learn basic English skills throughout grade school and up to high school, most of the advanced steps are forgotten by the time the student is to enter college. Paired with this, are the nontraditional students, who haven’t studied advanced academic language for long periods of time. Professors are expecting students of all kinds of study to have a high academic vocabulary and high writing skill. Often times a gap in remedial writing courses within the first semester or so.…
Reflective writing as a genre allows for a combination of personal reflection and critical thinking all intertwined into one. I turned my reflection essay into a new reflection that focused on a different level of the education system that would allow for me to reflect on my first semester of college to back up my allegations against the school system. When attempting to revise my essay in a new way I reread my old one and found an interesting theme screaming out of the paper. It was saying, “high school and Regents did not prepare me for college.” I took the idea a little further and expanded it to the SAT, that is a similar testing style to Regents, that similarly did not prepare me for college, and through research I found that income status…
When it comes to producing academic papers my writing style remains adaptive to meet the rhetorical context of a specific course. Meaning, my focus and attention is directed towards proper formatting, and writing a paper that engages a reader. My process involves narrowing in on a topic, gathering sources, free style writing, creating an outline, writing a draft, revisions, and then producing a final…
In “Five Myths About Writing”, the section discussed beliefs that caused issues when students were learning how to write. Four out of the five, I already knew they were false. However, I did learn that the myths all had one thing in common. These myths were exactly how teachers from elementary to high school had taught us to write essays.…
Have you ever gone to school and didn’t know how to write or start an essay? I’m pretty sure this all happens to us, which is why we attend school to improve our writing. Seeing myself at the age of five, I’ve always wanted to write a paper as if I was a writer. Now being a ninth grader, I have improved a lot. Improvement came in a variety of ways such as, using proper vocabulary or even spelling a word correct.…
Writing proficiency is below grade levels across the country; therefore, teaching practices must be a concern when looking to improve students’ writing abilities. This article mentions something that Santrock also stated, finding effective ways to teach writing can be difficult because students are all at different skill levels. (Zumbrunn and Krause, 2012, 346). To determine the best way to teach writing, interviews were done with important authorities in the area of writing who concluded…
I think that paraphrasing will be the hardest for me to avoid while writing. It seems that sometimes it is hard to write or summarize something that is so well written already. The way I will work around that is to stop and re-read what I am wanting to summarize, take a few important words out of the material I am reviewing and jot those down, then go back and write what is needed to complete my sentence or idea. Once I have completed my writing, I will review and make sure I have properly cited my work. Using the guidelines discussed in our “Read Section”, and following the instructions listed on how to source correctly should avoid paraphrasing mistakes and plagiarism.…
Have You Developed a System of Writing That Works Most of The Time I really have not looked up different styles of writing let alone realized there was so many different types of it. My method is not necessarily a method per se, I have always for the longest time just wrote down as if I was speaking to someone. That to me was where my biggest praise came from, that I was able to write with such voice and was able to emulate my presence through the pages. When writing for an essay there is a period where I read and reread the question to gather all the information that is needed. Once the question is fully understood, I try to explain myself in full detail.…
The correct use of different words creates good sentence structure (Grellier & Goerke, 2010). Using parallel words in each sentence can help the reader better understand the ideas (Grellier & Goerke, 2010). In my writing am have developed this skill from feedback I received from smart thinking (www.smarthinking.com) earlier in my degree. I understand the use of the same or a similar word makes my writing more understandable.…
Well, I consider myself to be a decent writer, even though writing is not my strong point. Therefore, as I have come to the completion of my degree, I have learned numerous writing skills along the way. I learned the MLA style, when I started taking my basics in college and the APA style for my upper division courses. At times I get confused on the formats as I consider them to be similar in some ways. Furthermore, they differ and each has its own different style of quoting and citation in articles, books, phrases, etc.…
My writing process coming into junior year was quite flawed and would go moderately like this: I would try and start with some hook that at least sounded like it related to the topic I was assigned. I then added a thesis that did not sound like total trash that included exactly what I planned to discuss. As I wrote the rest of my essays, I would sometimes realize there was something I felt added to the argument’s appeal, and after adding it to the body paragraphs, I summed it up in a couple words and squeezed it into my thesis. That was about the maximum amount of revising I would do for my essays. My decently crafted essays contained simple diction with a few SAT words I remembered while writing thrown in awkwardly.…
This separates the quality of his first year students writing skills to his current students…
English Writing Styles Formal Paragraph High school is a particular time of education in a student’s career that allows them to explore interests of their choice along with more complex classes that they are made to take. In high school, there are four tiers to the graduation process. Students go to high school from the general grades of ninth grade all the way to twelfth grade. During these drastically short four years, students must choose classes that will help them with their future plans of study.…
What is more important is that students practice writing. Teachers also need to devote time to feedback through individual sessions or “conferences”. There are typically two types of conferences: a content conference in which the teacher asks the student about his or her story and a skill conference where the teacher emphasizes basic writing skills such as spelling, punctuation and…