Leslie Jewkes
English 102
December 10, 2012
Reflection of English 102
Writing is intended to be fun, educational, factual, un-factual, whatever the writer is trying to portray. In English 102, one has gained knowledge and experience in learning how to write a good paper through research. The way to get your story across is to take your experience and information, and make it interesting. According to Jerald Walker, “One thing I constantly urge my creative writing students to do is to lay off the metaphors. Go easy on morals, lessons, and “points”-it’s the reader’s job to worry about those. Your job is simply to try to tell a good story”(254). This quote by Walker is one of the memorable points in English 102 that will make its way through life with me. This semester in English 102, our goal was to learn how to write an informational argumentative paper about a particular topic that is otherwise dry, sad, and emotional. While writing about these topics, one had to maintain a way of telling a story to keep a reader attached, while keeping it factual and arguing a point. The theme around our project was the millennium development goals, set out by the United Nations. Within the goals, I focused on the eradication and ending of extreme poverty and hunger.
Throughout the course of English 102, we wrote three main essays, including a local argumentative essay, a film analysis essay, and a global argumentative essay. All three papers were to be involved with and pertain to our theme of millennium development goals, particularly for me, eradication and ending of extreme poverty and hunger.
In my first paper involving poverty locally, I looked at the cause and ways to end poverty right here in Idaho. I explored reasons behind why poverty in Idaho is relatively high, such as reasons like under educated work force, not a lot of high paying jobs, and the good paying jobs present, typically are forced to higher from out of the area, because of the under educated work force. I explored programs in place to help move from an under educated work force to a qualified work force such as go-on-Idaho.gov. In this essay, I talked about ways to educate our youth to learn how to grow their own food, learn how to nutrition themselves through proper eating and cooking.
Our next paper we worked on in English 102 was our film analysis paper. I chose to analyze Slumdog Millionaire. In this essay, I explored the ways the director told a story of a boy’s life who grew up in a poverty stricken village in Mumbai, India. Director Danny Boyle took an opportunity to make an entertaining movie with an unrealistic twist in an efforts to show the reality of what life is like for the less fortunate such as those seen in his movie Slumdog Millionaire. This essay gave a great opportunity to write an entertaining essay while discussing a topic which is for some, “better left unmentioned”.
The last essay we wrote in English 102 was an argumentative essay involving poverty at a global level. Poverty is not an issue that can be debated. It exists whether you like it or not. Most chose to ignore it, to make it go away. What is debatable about poverty is why it exists, and how to move poverty to extinction. In my essay, I chose to argue a point, “Poverty can be eliminated in rural areas by providing education and the tools necessary for those communities to become self sufficient” (Lombardo).
English 102 has provided me with the ability to change a boring plain text essay into something interesting to read; provided a way to write an argumentative essay on a touchy subject such as poverty, without forcing the readers into a coma. The way to obtain this success is through telling a story. The way to fulfill this is by using your rhetorical voice instead of writing words onto a piece of paper. Scott Russell Sanders says, “the essay is a haven for the private idiosyncratic voice in an era of anonymous babble” (798). What Sanders is saying here is, the way to writing an interesting essay is by not saying what is already been said over and over again. This experience and knowledge of writing styles gained through English 102 will prove to be ever useful in future classes as well as a professional career in business. The knowledge of getting your point across without sounding like a blabbering duck, while keeping the information interesting would make any boring budget meeting more pleasurable.
Works Cited
McQuade, Donald and Robert Atwan. The Writer's Presence: A Pool of Readings. Boston, New YorkBedford/St. Martin's, 2012. Textbook.
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