Stephanie’s Blog

    There is one major good point in writing a proposal, that would be to find out what exactly you want to research.  It can take people forever sometimes to figure out what they are into and what they want to research.  This gives them a head start on their research, and makes them choose a side for their argument. It makes you develop a thesis and actually think about the issue before researching it totally and writing a paper on it.  This is a good place to start for any paper. It can help in any paper.  Even if not asked too, I will be using this idea of a proposal to form my ideas on papers and gather my thoughts and my thesis.

I could also use a proposal for something other than writing a paper.  I could use a proposal in a job. I could use it to write my letter in my resume to show why I would be good at a job and exactly what I could bring to that job; or, I could just use it for myself like if I was trying to decide between two jobs.  I could kind of write a proposal on each one of them and see which one I like better after that.  A proposal can be used all around today. Also, a proposal is very helpful today! It really pays off in the end to take this approach before trying to dive right into the assignment.

    Synthesizing a real life situation seems tough, especially since I’m not very good at synthesizing.  One of the hardest things for me to do when reading is to figure out what two different articles have in common, to synthesize those articles.  I think I have found a very good life story, and I’m actually going to tell it in story form. So here goes:

 A World of Perfection

  I’m sitting up on a cloud, just floating all over the world.  I can go anywhere right now, see anything I want to see. Wow, there is my house; it looks so small from way up here.  Oh no, there he is.  How did he get up here, I’ve always had a crush on him.  He’s walking over to me.  What do I do, my stomach is starting to turn knots. Oh no, I think he’s going to say something. What should I say back, I’m so nervous.

“Hey Stephanie, Stephanie”

Wow, he just said my name.

“Stephanie, wake up the bell is ringing”

What, what is going on?

That is when I awoke in English today.  We were out of time, yet people were still debating on school uniforms.  This has been a debate for probably a year now in our school.  All I know is when it is my turn to go up there, I will not let anyone down.  I love to debate and I will show them that I know exactly what I’m talking about.

The next day I was up to debate.  I wasn’t quite sure how to start, so I started by proving to people why school uniforms would be hard to accept. After all, I am talking to a bunch of football players and cheerleaders, and in my school, that means preppy people. So, I pointed out how school uniforms wouldn’t be as “pretty” or “hot” as regular clothing would. I pointed out that everyone would have to dress the same and there would not be any difference among people’s looks in the school anymore.  Then I pointed to a good friend of mine.  Her name was also Stephanie and I had just actually took the time to talk to her a couple months ago.  No one really seemed to know who she was.  That is when I pointed out that everyday she gets made fun of.  That everyday she goes home in tears because of people that were sitting right in the class room.  Uniforms would make it to where she looked just like everyone else.  She wouldn’t have to worry about having holes in all her jeans, or having shirts that looked five sizes too big.  Everyone would look the same, but that could be a good thing.

The next part of my debate was bringing in my two younger cousins to school, Miranda and Ashli. The two of them went to toledo schools and had to wear uniforms. Neither one of them liked uniforms at first, but it kind of grew on them.  I also brought in their mother, Leigh Ann.  I told the class how she had informed me that uniforms are not that expensive either.  Students/parents would not have to spend a fortune on the uniforms like they do regular clothes already.  Leigh Ann helped me inform the students of how she found out a way that schools help out people who cannot afford uniforms and she has become a part of helping that way out.  She said there were a lot of parents, that once their child outgrows the uniform they will sell it for less, or donate that uniform to some child in need of one.  This is a great thing to have.  Not only will uniforms help out people from not getting teased, but the people that are teased are normally the people that do not have enough money to buy all the “in things”. So, uniforms can come cheap and help control the amount of teasing going on within a school.

Needless to say, I did end up winning the best argument out of the whole class.

By: Stephanie Barkhimer

My final draft to essay one, the critique, I feel somewhat confident about. I did not understand exactly what to do for the critique, but I sort of understand it. My rough draft did not do so well, so I decided to start from scratch all over again and rewrite the whole thing. I think overall, it is a pretty good final draft. My writing process was to start all over from the beginning. I used little post it notes to note things that I knew I would want to use in my paper. Also, I reread the text about ten times to get what I needed out of it.

For the next essay, I plan to be able to pull out key concepts. Also, I want to be able to analize what the author is writing and be able to summarize the article. This critique was a great way to start the year, because it taught me to know what I am looking for when reading an article. It taught me to read the article once, then go back and reread it as many times as needed to get what is needed out of the article. However, for my next essay, I’m not going to focus so much on critiquing the author and proving why the methods the author stated would or would not work. This next essay is going to be one of the best.

Criteria is used everyday to make decisions. Just by thinking about what you want to eat, you’re using criteria. It’s sounds like this in your head. “Hmmm I think I want pizza tonight, but that is kind of greasy. Then again salad sounds good. Yet, salad isn’t that filling.” Then you start to go into something along the lines of why you want each food and which one you want more until you finally come up with what you want to eat. Some decisions though aren’t really that easy.

Sometimes a big decision comes up, like which college are you going to go to after senior year of high school. That is the biggest decision that most people have to make. There are so many schools out there, how does a person narrow it down. Start by saying what you want the school to have, like a certain sport, or good restaraunts around campus. Does the school you want to go to have a campus you can live on or is it all apartments? Do you want it to be a religious school, or no religion involved. There are a lot to choose from. For example, when I decided to come to Bowling Green University, I was positive of my choice, but I’ve been thinking about it for years. See, my brother is four years older than me and he went to BGSU so I was always on campus or in his apartment/house visiting him. I knew what the neighborhood was like and what the school was like. I liked the school, but certain things worried me. Like all the parties and rapes that go on at BGSU. I didn’t want to be one of those girls that got raped or something. That is the only reason that I was leary on coming here. However, I want to be a teacher and they have one of the best teaching schools around. Having a child you don’t really have much options open also, so my son came into play a lot. I didn’t want to have to drive too far, and I knew I had to live at home. I knew I didn’t want to start at a community college and then transfer to BGSU, I just wanted to attend one college that way I wouldn’t have to bother with trying to transfer anything. Plus, I’ve had friends who have had problems transferring their credits and not all the credits transferred. After going through all of this, I decided that there was no doubt about it in my mind that BGSU was where I wanted to attend college. I used all of the above criteria to come up with my decision. Some people may throw some more criteria in there to come up with their decision. It all depends on the person on what criteria they look for. Criteria is used in everyday decisions whether we realize it or not.

     Coming into this course I am actually pretty confident on my writing.  However, I know that no one is perfect and there are areas that I need to work on.  Well, for starters, this is my first online course so I’m still getting used to figuring out how to do everything on here. Hopefully in a week or two I will have everything figured out so I will know exactly what I am doing. 

     There are actually quite a lot of things that I want to learn from this course.  I would like to learn how an online class works to see if I want to take another one or not.  Online courses would be more convenient for me, but who knows if I’ll understand everything or not. I’ll just have to wait and see. Also, I feel as if my writings are good; however, I know the areas that I need to improve on.  My conclusions to my paper always seem difficult for me to write.  Most people think it is the easiest part of the paper, but for me it is the hardest.  I never seem to know how to end my paper leaving my reader thinking about what I wrote about.  Also, my works cited page needs a lot of help.  I’m really bad at knowing how to cite sources, so I’m hoping that maybe I could get a better understanding of how to do that.

     The better parts of my writing are the body of the paper.  I just seem to get my papers flowing good from one idea to the next.  It just comes easy to me.  My introductions are also one of my strong points.  I wait until after I have finished writing my paper to write my introduction and that seems to be easier.  I just think to myself that if I was the reader how could the introduction pull me in. 

     From the instructor I expect to get criticism.  I want honest editing or reviewing to how my papers are coming along.  It really won’t hurt my feelings at all, I just want to know what I can do to better my papers.  Also, I would like help with taking an online course.  Since this is my first one, I will have a lot of questions and I just want to know that the instructor will be there to help answer them. Other than that, this seems like it’s going to be a very interesting course for me.