Formal/Closed and Informal/Open

Formal writing consists of all the strict rules and guidelines, like no contractions, no vernacular terms, and has to follow a format. Informal writing is the opposite. It can use any type of language and format. Even though these things are obvious from the names, open and closed writings are slightly different. No writing is all open or all closed. They are usually either more open with some closed qualities or vise versa. Open writing is fantasy, fiction, and everything like that, while closed is more like business reports, and anything that is super heavily based on regulations.
Both my cause proposal and my summary/strong response essay are close to closed. They are more formal with a report style, but they still have some aspects of an open form of writing. If u haven't taken anything out of this blog well then, whatever.

An Effective Introduction

Apparently, everything that I ever learned about setting up an introduction is wrong (that figures). The old way is boring and hard to follow, which is not hard to believe, because I thought my intros sucked.
The old way, also called the "funnel introduction", was starting with a broad generalization and then just narrowing it down to the topic. The better way of doing it has a complete different outlook on the information being used.
First, you start with old information that everyone already knows. Then, you add a new truth or something unknown about that information to surprise your readers and get them hooked. I never realized this, but it does make sense. When some article starts off with something that I am interested in and then completely changes my thinking process about it, I will probably read the rest of the article.
I don't think I've ever used this tactic' but its better late then never. My first paper to try and use it on is my summary/strong response essay. It sounds fun right? Well we will see how much this new style of introduction really changes papers.

I Had No Idea.

After we started to write some reports on this cause thingy, we had to find an article that relates to our cause. The students of the composition class are starting on Summary/strong response essays which are just reports with a summary of the article and pretty much a response to the article if it wasn't obvious. But the response is a little bit more complicated. It has to do with two elements: the rhetorical situation of the article and the points/ideas of the article.
Back to the main point of this blog. We found out that in the second symester of our class we are actually going to start with our causes. I mean we have to go out and do whatever we wrote about. We are reaching those places and changing the situations that we felt strongly about. For me, I am going to actually help Christian clubs and organizations in the public school system. I mean it is cool and all, but actually doing it is kind of worrysome. I'm not one to do something. I'm all bark, but who knows, this might turn out really good (hopefully).

It's Only the Proposal

Recently in comp. class we have been working on our causes. If that just completely confused you then that is why I'm gonna explain this to you. Causes. We were assigned to right about a cause that we feel strongly about like abortion, help for disabled students, or something like that. I chose Christian organizations and clubs within the public school system.
 I have been in the public school system, and it isn't a pretty place. It is a place where students go and try to be something that they are not. Most students act completely different at school than at home. It is a rough environment where students try to watch their backs from being teased or bullied in any way, and to do that, you have do only what is acceptable with the norms of the school and the other student that go there.
 In my own experience, many students act like they have to be better than everyone always getting in the last word, or maybe saying the wisest come back. It is sad how the morals have fallen. I swear out of the like 1,000 students only like maybe one-hundred did not cuss regularly, and far less didn't participate in corse joking or the practice of building people up with compliments other than tearing them down with insults. That is why I chose this as my cause.

Literacy Narrative and What's Relative

      This week in the overflowing fountain of knowledge for a class called Composition, we have started our long journey of constant revisions, not that I'm complaining, for writing a simple literacy narrative. To the average audience, writing a paper that might be only two pages long shouldn't take very long at all, but for people who have known how it is to be the author you know how much longer it takes. The easier part is getting the first ideas and composing them into a rough draft. The harder part is getting those ideas to flow, make sense, relate to the audience, and accomplish your purposes for your audience.
      First of all the narrative, a narrative is a story where you narrate a paper that gives a story from your past that relates to a point that you are trying to explain using that paper. For example, if you wanna make a point about giving a speech, then you would tell a story, could be embarrassing, about you giving a speech and how it has affected you positively or negatively depending on what point your trying to make. in this case our point has to do with literacy, thus giving us the literacy narrative. To put it all together, we had to write a paper about a story in our past that deals with literacy, like first learning to read or write and things like that.
      So I wrote a literacy narrative, but, to my surprise, we are also learning how to become "writing tutors" in the class. Being a writing tutor, and yes i will be saying tutor quite frequently so get your laughs out now, is reading over someones paper and focusing on their Higher Order Concerns, or the harder part mentioned before in the first paragraph, and not the Lower Order Concerns, like grammar and spelling. After writing the rough draft, we were supposed to exchange papers and become writing tutors for each other in the class. So on the bottom i have my rough draft for you . I had mixed reviews not really any horrible ones but my third paragraph was considered "cheesy", and there was some fighting going on in the class, chairs being thrown and tables being flipped, computers smashed and pretty much whatever else happens in an all out brawl of epic proportions (unfortunately I over exaggerated to the extreme about the fighting going on in the class room). I revised my paper and then had it checked by the teach, and am currently writing the second revision of which I'm certain there will be more then just two.
      The writing process is definitely this long drawn out process of rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, and this time i am complaining, but it will probably be extremely better in the end. I'll post the final draft so you can see the difference.
     
      My rough draft

Rhetorical: A Missunderstood Word

     The word rhetorical or rhetoric is used quite often in everyday language especially in the phrase "it's a rhetorical question." The interesting thing is rhetorical, used in this context, is actually being used correctly, but most people misunderstand why it is being used in the first place.
     As a composition student, I have been learning a lot about writing and what's involved with it like the writing process, but then we started to learn about the "rhetorical situation"and how much it is actually used in writing. The thing is rhetoric means using language effectively to pursuade, inform, educate, or entertain, and the rhetorical situation means the circumstances in which you communicate. This means that the word rhetoric simply is using language to your advantage like changing the views or thoughts about a subject of a person or persons.

     The truth is, before taking this class, I couldn't tell you what the word rhetoric means, or the fact that rhetoric was even a word. Now i think that the word is stinkin' sweet, and I can go to all my friends saying things like, "did you know rhetoric is a word and it is used commonly in writing and speaking, and it means blah blah blah." It's really cool to sound smart I definitley recommend trying it sometime, but there is more to it than just the word rhetoric. The whole rhetorical situation that writers use consists of parts that make the whole. The whole is the context or the backround of the author while the parts are the audience, the purpose, and the genre. The writer has to consider all these subjects when writing. It's not an easy thing, but I'm sure it gets better, well that's what I'm hoping.

A Blog on Blogging

I have never been the one to follow blogs or even read them much at all. Really the only times i would ever see a blog was only because I googled something. But I never really hated them. It was more of an indifference, until I heard that I was gonna start a blog for my composition class. My comp. teacher told us information about blogging, and the fact that Twitter is actually a micro-blog. I was like :0 whaaaaaaat. I tweet quite frequently, and i think that it's pretty stinkin sweet.

What is blogging? Blogging is actually a "web log" which is why they are now called blogs. You get it. Well anyway, Blogs were first used for online diaries in like the late 1990s untill it became easier to use so then many people started to create blogs for tons of different reasons. There are tons of interesting facts also about blogging like 2/3 of all bloggers are male, and more than half of bloggers are married. blogging can provide all kinds of information from businesses to the daily thoughts of a an average person. In fact, most of the information I have in this blog is from blogs.

The truth is that I'm pretty excited to get into the world of blogging. I mean what harm can it do, right? Everybody else seems to enjoy it, and who knows, maybe this will become a famous blog or something. Maybe in the top fifteen like "The Huffington Post", or maybe I am dreaming.