Blog #5

My name is Monique Bingham and I am a student that just got done taking English 110. I took AP English in high school, the main purpose of this class was to prepare us for the AP exam (it was not mandatory that we took it) and to complete our career passport. We read many books that were commonly found on the AP exam, so it could give us a better selection and we also took many practice exams. For our Career Passport we did several short essays about our life and future career goals. This class didn’t prepare me for college so when I got here I took two classes in order to improve both my reading and writing skills to become a better college writer. We mainly focused on critiquing things and we held discussions about the things we had to read.

All English 110 classes have a theme and the one that out teacher decided to pick was “The World as a Text: Defining, Exploring and Composing Rhetoric”. Not knowing what rhetoric was I was a bit confused because at first I thought she was talking about a rhetorical question. However, with the first major project you will totally understand what it means. The best way to explain it would be to pick your favorite song or something and to try to use the song as an example of explaining something else. I know it sounds a bit confusing but you will get it as the class progresses on.

The best way to be successful in class is just to come every day and do all the projects and readings. That might sound simple but it doesn’t always happen. I do think that coming to class is very important because that is where she explains how to do everything because just trying to figure out everything on your own will not work for this class.

I hope you enjoy the class and don’t forget to go to class.

Blog #4

One thing that I noticed about the writings on commonplace is that each writer is trying to prove a point in their essays. There are trying to show how important a certain issue is and how as a society we can do to change it or help prevent it.
The similarity between my RAP and commonplace is that they are each trying to show how important an issue is. I think that I could change my essay to just focus on one issue instead of showing how one major issue can lead to many others. I could just explain how many things can lead to poverty and how it can happen to multiple people. That it’s very common in today’s society. Or I could show how poverty is becoming a major part in today’s society. That will show that the topic is current and that the numbers of people in poverty will continue to grow unless the nation does something to help it or prevent it.
Both my secondary and primary sources can help show physical and emotional abuse can lead to a person living in poverty.
My ideal audience of my work would be college students because they are the people of the future and can play a big part in trying to end people’s life of poverty. They can work with people through volunteer work and just providing a helping hand.

In-Class Blog

One thing that i usually go through when writing a paper is repeating myself. I tend to do this because i try so hard to stress the point or argument that i want to make and a lot of the time it just tends to seem like i keep repeating myself. Another thing that i tend to do is argue the point i want to make and in the process i tend to start talking about something else so instead of have one argument i have many more.

Something that helps me edit my paper is rereading my paper out loud. It might sound crazy because i was the one that wrote it so i should know what it says. But its good to reread it out loud very slow in order to catch all the small mistakes because as the writer you tend to read it how you want instead of how it really sounds because you know what you want to say. Or another thing is have a friend read it out loud to you.

Blog #3

The writing process for the RAP had many similarities with previous experience I have had. The one that is the most important is the process of going through and writing multiple drafts. It helps the writer go through different stages within their own writing and become a stronger and more developed writer. Another thing is getting feedback from either the teacher or peers. It helps when writing a paper because they can help with the development process. When a person writes a paper they know what they are talking about and it helps when other people read it because they can show the writer what they get as a reader. However the amount of feedback was something I have never experienced before.

Since I’m working with song lyrics and a video, one thing that helped me with interpreting the lyrics of the song was breaking it up and putting certain lines in different categories. Another thing was just to listen to the lyrics, watch the video with no sound and to read the lyrics of the song. This helped me look at the different ways the artist and director was trying to explain what was going on. For the secondary source I used two articles and the one thing that helps me was to go through both of them and to highlight the parts that I thought could in some way build my paper into a stronger argument. If had more time I would bring additional sources to better explain the topic that I’m discussing.