Welcome to my English 250 Blog. You can use the menu above to get around to the different pages. Thanks for visiting!

Introduction

This blog is designed to showcase my work in English 250 and demonstrate my ability to use Written, Oral, Visual and Electronic communication styles. This class has helped me improve and refine my rhetorical style.

When I began this course  I typically wrote my essays by assembling an outline first with no real order or care for the points that it contained, leading to a far more disjointed essay. The points did not smoothly flow together and some parts were much larger than others, making the smaller parts feel less well formulated and less important. However, during class, I learned a much easier and more helpful method of constructing outlines, where you determine what your main thesis is, think of 3 (or some other number) supporting ideas, and for each supporting idea you use 3 more supporting details. By constructing an outline in this way, I can ensure that it has a consistent pacing and content throughout leading to a much better paper.

I also plan on using this technique in the future for teaching. One important thing that I didn’t learn but believe should have been taught in high school is how to write a fully cited academic paper, and while I did write several page papers in high school, there was never a major focus on the content and citations. When I teach history I will have the opportunity to give students their first experience with proper writing techniques and I believe that the method of outlining a paper that I learned in this class will be useful in teaching students in the future.

Also before this class, I would write a paper with no rough draft, and if there was one, there would be little or no revision. By requiring rough drafts in class, I was forced to prepare them beforehand, which I believe strengthened my writing.

Overall I believe that this class has been a positive experience and that I have added more tools to my toolkit which will make me a more effective communicator in the future.