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.