Chapters 1 & 2 Response

Let's just start out with saying, the process of writing can be very overwhelming! First there is trying to pick a topic, second you want to find your target audience, and third what is the point that you want to get across. It’s a process of  planning, developing your story, and drafts upon drafts upon drafts.

Planning

-Your Audience

-Purpose

-Listing out your ideas and/or basic guidelines

Developing

-Research

-Facts

-Opinions

-Brief Outline

Draft

-Drafts

-Make sure it makes sense

-Making sure that your paragraphs relate to your thesis

You want to make sure that what you are writing has a purpose, creativity, inspiration, etc. Key

factors in writing and drafting is making sure that you revise, edit, and proofread. Always make sure that you are writing for your audience and if it will make sense to them.

Anngelique Ciancio Pages 6-12

From pages 13-18, the book addresses the concept of considering your audience and it gives checklists that can be used as guides for writing for a college audience. It also discusses the importance of the reading process. The book describes that the reader should be  active, critical, analytical and questioning.  Personally, I think this chapter is a good reminder to be fully engaged when reading and writing. Professionally, this chapter will certainly come in handy when I'm considering what I want my audience to be and also when I'm reading the textbook and writing my papers.

Hayley Leach Pages 13-18

The reading process is just as critical as the writing process, given the phase you're in whether you're editing your own work or reading over someone else's. There are three basic steps when it comes to the reading process:

Prepare:

Back-up plan

Obtain knowledge

Skim and scan

Identify your purpose

Respond:

Read thoroughly

Annotate

Take notes

Read Critically:

Brainstorm ideas

Read literally

Read analytically

It's very important to ask yourself questions throughout the entire reading process, such as; Why are you reading? Do you need to be ready to discuss the text in class? How does the writer begin? Etc. Whether you're reading or writing, it's important to think realistically and critically about the piece in order to distribute accurate work or feedback.

Sami Gardner pages 19-24

Reading on Literal and Analytical Levels

Knowing

• Once you read the passage you need to decode information and recall it, I try to summarize each page on a notecard so that I can come back to it later!

Comprehending

• You have to understand what you are writing about. That way, for example when I come back to my little notecard I may use key phrases which I identified in the text and because I comprehend them I am able to better understand my own notes and text as a whole.

Applying

• Connect the knowledge to something that you already know, this not only makes it easier to recall but also gives it some personal meaning. After all these texts should be important to you.

Analyzing

• Now that you have all the information you are ready to apply your incredible sluething skills, analyze the information for key facts and phrases that support whatever message you’re trying to convey!

Now that that’s done we can move onto Generating Ideas from Reading! This is a simple section with may phenominal ideas on ways to dissect your favorite novel. However the most important part of this is Paraphrasing and Summarizing. Paraphrasing is restating an author's idea but in your own language. Let’s take the first two lines of text from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.”

“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore - “

Wow, I mean my mind is blown by the amount of subtext in just two lines. However one does not simply go around quoting Poe and expect everyone to get it, when writing papers you have to translate this text into something that matters. Something that people can understand, however if you’re using Paraphrasing you’re trying to do it in the your own words. However using another technique above called Analyzing we can pick out the bits of text to support our argument. Let’s say our argument is that the speaker in this piece is down on his luck and we have to Paraphrase to do that, so here’s an example!

In the first two lines of text from “The Raven” by Poe the speaker is feeling weak and weary from a kind of depression. As he is looks over and flips through many books long forgotten on the shelf of his study he experiences that feeling while revisiting memories long forgotten. The books are like the memories of his lost love, something to be picked up and looked at. No longer physically there to share and provide in such experiences.

Now let’s move onto Summarizing, Summarizing is when one gives the main points in a piece. Using the same bit of text above from Poe let’s try and Summarize his ideas while applying our analytical skills from above.

The speaker is depressed while sifting through books

or

The speaker feels weak and tired due to his loss of a loved one, he is flipping through old books trying to distract his addled mind.

The difference between Paraphrasing and Summarizing is that one tries to give you the meaning of the text while including the meaning, the other gives facts and statements about the text as a whole. However both of these can be used when one is trying to read critically. You may use these to quickly determine what the best pieces of a text are, or prepare a quote for your paper by Paraphrasing it once before doing it again. The texts you read are important, and it is good to remember some of the lessons they teach.

That One Guy (Patrick McGill) Pages 24-33