Formal Review for English 100

English 100 has helped me this semester to really establish some really good writing habits and techniques that I never developed when I was younger. Either I wasn’t ready to become a good writer or my English teachers weren’t very good at explaining how to develop writing skills.

Even though I was apprehensive at first about blogging, the blogs ended up being a very useful tool for me in writing my tasks. The blogs helped me develop and organize my thoughts during the life of a task, especially during tasks three and four. Once I got use to doing the blogs, I found myself enjoying them. The blog allowed me to write freely about the passages and essays that were assigned.

As far as changes to the class structure, I wouldn’t change anything. The curriculum of the class was good in developing my writing skills. Before this class, I was a typical writer. Majority of my writing was done in the corporate environment, constructing emails and putting together training manuals. I never had to analysis or summaries an essay, or write creatively about my reading and writing experiences.

I’m glad that I chose to take this class. It opened my eyes to what type of writer I can be. I am looking forward to my next step in my writing process, next semester. This will be the first time in my academic career that I’m looking forward to an English class

Self Evaluation Task Three

The thesis of my paper is:

• Unlike thousands of children in the inner cities schools of Kansas City and Chicago, I had a great environment to get an education and participate in activities that wouldn’t cost me my life.

The main points in my paper are:

• The difference in the amount of money allocated toward each student in the two locations of the schools.
• How the inequality, between the two locations (suburban and inner city), is driven by the property taxes of the homes and local businesses, the need for public services and the non-profit / tax-free institutions in the cities.
• Students of the suburban schools don’t realize the advantages they have over those students in the inner city schools, because of the difference in the fund distribution
• What affect the parents have on the education their children get, whether it’s the inner city or the suburban schools

On this project, the peer evaluation wasn’t very helpful; since I took so long writing this paper and I mainly relied on your comments.

The most helpful information I received in the classroom was having open discussions about the essays we were assigned to read, during the process of this task.

I wrote two rough drafts, one with just my comparisons and the other including all the components for this task.  I started writing this paper during the weekend before the rough draft was due. I went through the steps of writing an outline for this paper. I’ve found when I’m short on time writing out an outline gives me good direction.

There were a couple things I liked about this paper; one being, this is the last task for this semester. Two, it was nice to see how I’ve grown as a writer though this semester.

Response to Rodriguez

My relationship with books has changed as I’ve gotten older. As a kid, I didn’t enjoy reading at all. Similar to Rodriguez, my parents never read books for pleasure. They read strictly for informative reasons. Therefore, reading was never really pushed upon me as a kid. It wasn’t until about 5 years ago, I started developing an interest for books and taking the time to read them. Most of the books I read at that time were motivational books about losing weight and maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Here recently, I’m finding myself reading books for entertaining purposes too. I’ve read the entire Twilight series, which is shocking for a guy to do; especially a guy that hardly read as a kid. I do see myself reading more in the future, not just for academic reasons, but for my personal satisfaction and interests. I’m planning to write a book sometime soon, about the struggles of being an overweight person and learning to maintain a healthy lifestyle. In order to do that, I think reading more books will help to increase my vocabulary and my writing skills. Reading is just like anything else, you get better by doing it more often. I don’t see myself going to the extreme like Rodriguez, checking out the max number of books at the local library, but I do see myself reading more challenging and intellectual books. The only struggle I have with reading is the speed in which I read. I’ve never been a fast reader and I get frustrated easily, when a passage takes longer than I think it should. I’m hoping over time that changes and reading becomes easier for me.