The link above is to a short essay I wrote in my First Year Experience Interprofessional Health Science class this semester. In class we had been reading a book called This I Believe edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman, which was a collection of short stories or essays about what people believe in. For this assignment we had to write an essay about something that we strongly believed in. This essay demonstrates a few of the things I have learned in English 110. I approached this essay with the recursive writing process from learning outcome number 1 in mind. I wrote a first draft and then came back to it the next day and read it over to make revisions. I reorganized the structure of this essay by moving some of the points I made at the end of the essay into the first paragraph. I also broke up the first paragraph and used a form of a naysayer paragraph. After revising the organization of my essay I read it over again to proofread for local revision. I was also able to use what I have learned from learning outcome number 3 by keeping in mind what I read in the book, This I Believe during class. I needed to employ techniques of active and critical reading and keep the structure of the This I Believe essays in mind when writing my own version of a This I Believe essay. I was also able to use the learning outcomes 5 and 6 by being able to control sentence-level errors by using the techniques learned from the presentations about grammar, punctuation, and spelling given during English 110.
I was also able to avoid some of the things that make bad writing bad that are talked about in Steven Pinker’s essay, “Why Academics Stink at Writing” because I wrote this essay after reading the article. I avoided using “metadiscourse” by not talking about what I was going to be talking about in the essay. Pinker says that “the art of classic prose is to use signposts sparingly, as we do in conversation…” (5), I kept this in mind when writing my This I Believe essay. I also avoided hedging in this essay by being confident about my position about what I believe in. As Pinker writes, hedging is when people “… cushion their prose with wads of fluff that imply they are not willing to stand behind what they say,” (7). Overall I tried to use the topics that Steven Pinker mentions in his essay to make my writing better.
English 110 has given me many tools that I can use and apply to my writing even outside of an english course to make my writing stronger and more understandable to those reading it.
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