Blog #1

This week was the start of English 1302. This week was all introductory and us, students, getting used to what class is like again. Mrs. Waits gave us the syllabus for English 1302 and what she expects. We talked about different subjects like the importance of coming to class to explaining how we need to use the blog. This week for our blog I need to talk about rhetoric devices.

I noticed rhetorical devices this week in watching YouTube. There are many ads nowadays about Mike Bloomberg’s campaign. I get different ads however they all tie in back to Mike Bloomberg. This ad stuck out to me because it was about climate change.  It displayed ethos by giving numbers of how carbon emissions reduced in New York City to make New York its cleanest it has ever been. This ad impressed me because climate change is a current issue going on now and considered if he will really solve the problem with climate change.

I used rhetoric this week when I convince my mom to not buy any more dishes. I always tell her we have many dishes that get used once or twice a year. She still owns dishes were from the nineties that aren’t used at all, so I try to tell her that buying more will take up unnecessary space. She tries to reason with me those dishes are pretty, and she wants to use them whenever she can. Eventually, after fifteen minutes of convincing her not to buy them, she doesn’t buy the dishes.

There are many things I would want to learn however going back to the basics is something that I need. I’m so used to doing advance concepts that sometimes that I would forget the most basic concepts of different grammar rules. Having the basic concepts down is like the foundation of a house. If the subject is not taught properly or remembered, the foundation would crumble. The rest of the things that were later taught to me would have no meaning if I don’t understand how to use the concepts to its most use. As a growing writer, there is no purpose if everything I was taught was just used poorly and not efficiently. 

Learning how to write better is something I want to learn how to improve. Most of the time, I think my sentences are so plain and boring to read. It’s hard to develop my skills as a writer if all I write are basic sentences with a little diversity to them. I would try to use a thesaurus to broaden my diction, but it was proved it to be very useless. I felt like it wouldn’t make sense in my writing when I used a complex term in my basic sentences.

 In my whole school life, all I was taught were to write essays to fit this prompt. Whenever I would have a one on one talk with the teacher on how to improve this essay, they would just tell me to change this certain part of the essay and everything else was fine. It didn’t seem like I was doing bad at writing because that was all the commentary I received from many teachers, so it seemed like I didn’t need to improve. It seemed useless asking teachers to review my work because the comments didn’t benefit me on how to improve on my skills in writing. All my teachers seem to worry more if I can write to answer the prompt. 

Now that I am in English 1302, this class is more focused on how to improve writing skills and if you can actually write. The problem with this is that my writing skills aren’t very good. I never was taught properly on how to write better and improve my sentences however, I am willing to learn how to improve my writing skills.

One of the most important things for me is learning how to write for my future. Writing reports resumes, essays for scholarships, etc. is something I know I need to learn how to write for later on in life. I would rather start early in high school and make my mistakes now rather than later on a big project. No one really teaches you how to write a report or a resume. I know I look online to see an example and based my resume on that, but I want to learn the proper way to write these subjects.  They say practice makes perfect, so learning how to write my essays now will benefit me later on.