Writing This Year + common errors list

Cole Kennedy

Dr. deGravelles

Block 4

4/30/12

                This year, I have written so much more than I expected. I thought that high school was going to be very easy, that was until I got about a month into Dr.D’s class. We wrote so many papers compared to previous years that it was ridiculous. But I thought that doing this really has helped me become a better writer and has helped me identify my problems I have in writing. I have learned that my main problem in writing is just conventions. Overall I think that I have improved very much over the year.

                Ninety-five percent of the time the feedback that I have received has been regarding conventions and other grammatical mistakes. So far, the ideas that I have written down have been fine and the reason that I have been missing points, I think is because the way that I put them on paper is incorrect. The conclusions that I can make from these different papers’ feedback are that I have a need to read my paper over several times just looking for grammatical mistakes and I need to read it out loud so that I can make sure that it makes sense. Another conclusion that I can make from the feedback that I have received is that I need to pay more attention to the details of what Dr.deGravelles teaches in class because the details are the main things that have been missing in my papers.

During the year on papers that I have had to write I have not had any problems with them being too short. An influential part of my grading on the Wrap was that it wasn’t long enough. The reason for this is because I had felt very cramped.   I hadn’t had time to really think my ideas through and develop them into fluently put together phrases that would result in me getting a higher mark. On the first day, I started off with prewriting. In 7^th grade I learned a skill that has still helped me today. Instead of just throwing down ideas I make a chart. With 2 boxes plus however many other topics you have each getting one box. You write down the main idea and then however many supporting details as you can and then it is much easier to write. I did this and it took up all of the first day.  The second day I wrote till we had to stop and I found myself leaving out pieces of information that wouldn’t matter all that much. So overall I think that timed essays don’t really work with me because I feel pressured and think that I need just cut my losses and move on. That is not a good plan.

My experience with writing over this year has progressively gotten better because with the writing of more than just two major papers in a year I have learned many things about myself as a writer. Over this year I have learned that I have no problem coming up with ideas or organization or sentence fluency, the thing I have a problem with is the punctuation, grammar, and conventions that are involved in actually getting these ideas into an organized document.  The way that I know this is that almost all of the feedback that I have received on my papers was about comma splices or wrong use of a semicolon or a misplaced comma. I swear if I had just read over all of my papers twice just correcting the grammatical mistakes my grade on all of them would have been so much higher. One of the main things that I learned is how lazy I am. How hard is it to read over a paper?

The feedback that I received surprised me honestly; I thought that the least of my worries was going to be conventions.  Turns out that convention should now be one of my main concerns. I do think that my feedback has matched my understanding of my work this year though. I think that it matched the most in the sense that ideas are not a problem for me. The only thing that is, is getting them down. The way that I evaluate my work is by how much time I spent on in and how much effort that I really put into it and no; it has not changed throughout the year.

 A goal that I want to achieve throughout this next year is that I want to have no more than three grammar problems on any given paper. Another is to not get lower than a B on any paper that I have in English next year.  A plan that I have to achieve these goals is that I am going to read each of my papers over three times before I finish writing it so that I can minimize the grammatical mistakes. For the B that I need on the papers I am going to make sure that I have developed my ideas completely and I am going to focus while writing the papers.

During the course of this year I have learned many things about writing and about myself as a writer. One of those things is that I am a very lazy writer. I need to make sure that I read and develop my paper before I turn it in so that I can get the highest mark that I can in English. One of the things that I have learned also that has helped me is that the details count. In response to this I am going to pay much more attention to the little details that come along with the class that helps you learn how to be a better literate person. I need to make sure that during class whenever the teacher is going over material that I am not I another world mentally. I need to make sure that I do not lose focus and that I only focus on what is going on in the class.

 Cole Kennedy

Dr.deGravelles

Block 4

4/26/12

Common Errors List

Missing Comma – Ex. When his parents asked him about his day, he just smiled and said “just an average day”.

Run-on- Ex.After they were brought back they were forced to work as a slave labor force, Haitian farmers thought of them as a cheap, effective slave labor that really do not know any better and really could not do anything about it unless they were fed salt or spices because if they taste salt or any kind of spice they would suddenly realize that they were dead and have a strong sensation that would make their bodies return to their graves and they could not become slaves again after that. Run-on sentence.

Comma Splice- Ex. He nods, a starting gun is shot with a loud “bang” his heart starts to race and then he cringes, he is feeling fatigue from lunch because he ate too much.

  

Misspelled- word- Rampageous- I spelled that word wrong

Quotation marks-   “Bu Bu Bu.”

Wrong page citing - . (56)

Word Choice- Global warming is a very bad thing and needs to be stopped.  

Repetition- There is also a spread of tropical disease that will be an issue also. 

Free Post

I listen to music all the time. There are a bunch of reasons why,i listen to music, most of the time it is because i need to focus on whatever i am doing. Other times i listen to music because i need to pass the time or go to sleep. Most of the time though i find myself listening to music because i am unconciosly trying to distract myself and not do my homework and i think that that has a big influence on my homework quality.

When i listen to music i think that it helps me focus because whenever i listen to music it kind of blocks out the rest of the noise around me and i would rather have noise that i like going on around me than having a whole bunch of noise that continuously surprises me an puts me off my train of thought. The only time that i restrict myself from listening to music when i'm doing my homework is whenever it is a reading assignment because if i listen to music then i can't focus on comprehending the words i can just read each individual word.

Free Post

I listen to music all the time. There are a bunch of reasons why,i listen to music, most of the time it is because i need to focus on whatever i am doing. Other times i listen to music because i need to pass the time or go to sleep. Most of the time though i find myself listening to music because i am unconciosly trying to distract myself and not do my homework and i think that that has a big influence on my homework quality.

When i listen to music i think that it helps me focus because whenever i listen to music it kind of blocks out the rest of the noise around me and i would rather have noise that i like going on around me than having a whole bunch of noise that continuously surprises me an puts me off my train of thought. The only time that i restrict myself from listening to music when i'm doing my homework is whenever it is a reading assignment because if i listen to music then i can't focus on comprehending the words i can just read each individual word.

Reading Response

I read 200 minutes. I read 50 pages of the Hunger Games and 47 pages of The Son of Neptune. In the beginning of my new book, The Son of Neptune, Percy has been chased by two gorgons for like a month and every time he kills them they wind up reappearing faster than he can get away from them. He has really run into some trouble buy whenever he finds an unsuspecting old woman in the median of an interstate, convinced that she is a god, he picks her up and runs to a door guarded by two guards who are kids from a roman camp for demigods. Percy then realizes that there is a completely new side to the whole demigod camp system. He is completely astounded by the idea.

 I liked the beginning of this book because i thought that it was very productive. i mean productive by the fact that i really learned a lot about the plot of the book in these first couple of chapters. I thought that i kind of felt the same way he did whenever he found out that there was a roman camp, you know that feeling that makes you feel like your entire world has been blown because of sime astronomical discovery, everyone knows that feeling.

Outside reading

this week i read 10 minutes of My poem and 140 of the Death Cure. Like i said, i have really understood this beginning of the book better the second time through. I understand the depth that comes with the opening of this book. The tension between W.I.C.K.E.D. and the former gladers, group B and some cranks is increasing drastically.

When Thomas was released from a cell after he has been in there for 3 weeks, intentionally disoriented so that he would not know what time it actually was, his meals were given irregularly. and it drove him crazy. Finally there was a pretty big load a news that was dumped on him. after a whole experience of the scorch with the thought that the flare was tearing him apart on the inside and then suddenly nothing, it turns out he was immune to it the whole time.

My Papa's Waltz Theodore Roethke

-in the first stanza the -b sound is used a lot.
-and the first and third lines rhyme
- in the second stanza there is a little rhyming but the -s sound is used a lot
- there is a bunch of rhyming in this poem
-more rhyming in stanza 4
I included my annotations of the poem

The major techniques that were used were assonance and consonance. This poem was about a little girl that was describing the "dance" that her father did whenever he got home most of the time. she had described in what she thought was a dance that her dad did with her all the time when in reality he was really just drunk and he could barley hold his balance. i think though that he was trying to dance with her.

The way that she uses assonance and consonance are that in each stanza she rhymes the same places in different stanzas. I think that she did that because she thought that it would make it sound more childish and realistic as if actually from a little girl dancing with her incapacitated dad. I don't think that she uses assonance on purpose in the sense that it doesn't change the way that you interpret the story.