Week 3 - Day 2 Homework

—       What is the most important vocabulary/key terms that we have learned so far in class? List as many terms as you can think of (at least 7) and write a one-sentence definition after the term (e.g., genre). Also, list which source discusses this term.

1. Genre: An easy and understandable definition for genre could be any type of writing. 

2. Critical Thinking: Is to evaluate a situation and make the right choices. 

3. College Writing: College Writing is a higher level of writing from High School which have alot of differences from High School Writing. 

4. Sources: The Sources for you writing and essay have to be accurate and up to date. 

5. High School Writing: It is kind of like a lower level from College writing where you have to follow a structure of 5 paragraph essay, 

I can only remember 5 of them. 

Essay Grading Criteria

What kind of genre of essay is essay 1? What is the purpose of the essay? (Write a short paragraph).

In my opinion, the genre of essay that essay 1 is an exam essay genre, or a persuasive essay. The reason being, this is really not a lab report and a creative genres because, it just state all the facts and try to convince people to do these things. The purpose of this essay is being to inform the reader about the safety of camping and demonstrate how to stay safe when camping.  

Based on our discussion of college writing, what should this essay be graded on? What categories would make sense? Why?

1.       Vocabulary – The more academic words a person use, show that that person is serious about the writing

2.       Structure – How is the general structure of the essay, does it have topic sentence, does it have concluding sentence for each paragraph,…

3.       Length – It depends on how long the teacher wants. If too short, minus some scores.

4.       Grammar – Are all the tenses correct, are they all properly used.

5.       Sources – What are all the sources, are they reliable, are they recent enough to be a reliable source?

Homework on Holiday (1/20/2014)

1. Kelsey Diaz never directly mentions critical thinking or habits of mind. What’s a passage (a few sentences – section) from her text that relates to critical thinking / habits of mind? How so?

- The passage: "How often do you read any serious writing that has...Don't do it in college, you professor will most likely laugh at you". I think, this passage present a sence of critical thinking because it didn't say exactly why you shouldn't do this in college, it just give you a trick question and you have to think of an answer to understand the general idea of the situation. Another passage that express the "critical thinking" factor of this piece of writing is "You must analyze the content of your source, not just read it,...you are the one that have to prove what you have learned".

2. Also think back to our discussion about the “thinking” in our sample essay. Yesterday, we said the five-paragraph essay that we examined wasn’t college level, not only because of its structure, but also because of the type of thinking. Why did we say the thinking and subject matter were not college level?

- The subject matter is not at a college level because it is not academic enough to be a college levels. What kind of college levels class would teach you how to prevent ourselves from danger when camping except "Camping Safty Class" or "Camping Medical Class". The topic of a college level writing should contain some critical thinking into it and some what a large scale matter, like "How will this effect the global?". That will engage the college students to use critical thinking more and force them to think criticaly.

3. How have we used critical thinking and habits of mind so far in our class?

- As far as I see, we have used the critical thinking technique to analyze the usefulless of a "Paper clip". Also, we use it to analyze the essay genre and the dos and don'ts in each genres.

 4. What critical questions do you have about the class?

- I just have 1 question about the class. So, we are going to write about college writing through out the whole quarter or the topic will be change depends on the chapter that we are on. That is the only question I want to ask before stepping in the 1st essay

"This isn't what we did in High School" - Donald A. McAndrew

1. In your own words, what are some of the differences between college writing classes and high-school writing classes, according to McAndrew? (Write at least one solid paragraph).
First of all, being in college, the atmosphere is way more relax and fun. It is a class where you are an individual and you are expect to express your ideas and thougth about each and every topic the teacher gives, not just sit and take note like in High School anymore.

Secondly, the class activities are all different due to the standard of a college writing class. We have active disscussion where all of the student who are in that class have to participate and give idea about the discussion's topic. The class also have friendly questions each day for each student so that the professor can know the students more.

Thirdly, there is assignment. The assignmnent in college are very diverse and not like in High School. It require high focus and research in order to achieve good grades, not like in High School where you just need to give some idea and opinion about something and consider it done. Also, the instructor won't give you "diamond-cleared" instructions like in High School, you need more clarification, come and ask the instructor.

2. In your own words, define participationist

Through reading McAndrew writing, I come to understand that "Participationist" is an action to take part in, to "participate" in, to discuss on a specific topic that you want to engage on, want to have knowledge on. That is how you learn and achieve knowledge, you take part in anything you want to know and try to gain as much as possible through it. 

3. In your own words, define social constructionist

Constructionist is actually a very interesting role in the class. A constuctionist is to keep the conversasion going on topic, the language to go smoothly. It is like a leader of a group but in a broad general way. 

4. In your own words, define psycho-sociolinguist.

Psycho-sociolinguist is like a language master. The other 2 group concentrate on alot of things, but this group, only concentrate on getting us a big and broad picture of language itselft. 

Homework for 1/15/13

1. What does the title mean? What does it tell us about what this document is attempting to lay out?
- The title "Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing". I personally don't really understand the word "Postsecondary" mean, but I think that this generally talks about the format of a good piece of writing, the way to achieve a good piece of writing in college. 

2. Who produced the document?
- Council of Writing Program Administrators, National Council of Teachers of English, and National Writing Project

3. In your own words, what are “habits of mind”? Which of the “habits of minds” bolded categories makes the least sense to you / do you want us to go over in class? Choose one category.
- Habits of mind is basically the most effective way to study of an individuals to make that individual success in the professional education life. 
- Metacognition

4. In your own words, what is “critical thinking”? Which bullet point makes the least sense to you / do you want us to go over in class?
- The ability to "CRITICAL THINKING" is the ability to evaluate a situation, to think about the causes and consequences of each choices and give out the most CRITICAL choice.

- Ability to compose in multiple environments

5. In your own words, what does “developing knowledge of conventions” mean?

- As I understand from the reading, "Developing knowledge of conventions" is trying to look up some general rules of writing for you to follow, some dos, some don'ts of writing that you have to strictly follow. 

 

The 5 Questions

1. What kind of racism are you talking about?
2. How long does this essay have to be? The minimum length of the essay?
3. When is the due date?
4. How many points will this essay be in the final grade?

"Enjoying Your Camping Trip" - Answers

1. The kind of genres I think this essay belong to is an "Exam Essay". In highschool, most of the essay I write is this kind of essay. The only different is that I didn't have to cite any source back in Highschool because the copyright rules in Vietnam is very fuzzy and not clear like in America. Some interesting topic that I have wrote about are "Chirldren rights on something",

2. Through reading this essay, I don't think that this essay is a college level writing essay. First of all, this writing don't have an exact genre or style. It just talk about an experience that the author have been through. One more thing, the sources are not specific enough for the reader and they are in the middle of an essay, made the essay and paragraph looks so messy and not clear.

3. I think this as a gerneral writing is a decent piece of writing because they use alot of high level vocabulary and the explanation of this essay is clear. But, the author needs to think again about the way to cite the sources that they use.

Answer the Question for the reading "Seven Ways High School Prepare You for Failure"

1. The writing style that the author describe does not really match my country writing style. In my country, Vietnam, I used to be studying in an International High School where we have English Native Teacher come from all over the world. They use English books from America to teach us English, so the writing style is a little bit different. The writing assignment is smaller, much shorter. It was also the same for the writing genres, we only write a few genres like "Creative Essay" or "Persuasive Essay". We have never write a Lab Report before because whenever we walk into a Lab, the teacher always give us handouts to fill in what the experiment is about and how it goes.

2. If you let me compare the Writing in High School with the writing now in College. I would prefered the writing in College more. One of the reason being in High School, I am one of the best student in English and the Essay in High School is very short. I can't fully express all I want to say in the limit of just 250 words, so sometimes, I have to shorten or cut of my idea and that would make my essay sound weird. The kind of writing I like huh? Well, I really like the "Creative Writing" with no limit beacuse I can create anything I think of and make up story for them, so far, I have had 3 successful creative story and I really love "Creative Writing".

Homework - 4 type of essay genres.

1. Persuasive Essay
- A persuasive essay is an essay that you present facts, informations, your own idea and opinion on a matter to persuade your audience that the way you take the matter is right.
- You can only TAKE on side because it could make your audience confuse if you support both side.
- Even if you take 1 side, still talks about the other side a little bit to not show out the bias personality of your essay.
- The format of the essay is:
        + Paragraph 1: Introduction on what you will be persuade your audience about and be sure to include your thesis statement that state your main idea and give out your direct opinion
        + Pragraph 2 + 3: State your reason why you support your ideas with 2 powerful and strong reason and some example or experience to support your idea.
        + Paragraph 4: Talk a little bit about the opposite opinion side to make it not look like you are biased.
        + Paragraph 5: Conclude

2. Narrative Essay:
- A Narrative Essay is an essay that describe a story of you or other people.
- It have to follow the time-space continuum order and doesn't jump from this to that so quickly.
- The story have to make sence in some way to other people too, not just to you.
- You can't you second person subject in this kind of essay.
- The format of the essay is:
        + Paragraph 1: Introduction to the story. Talk about the time and places that the story happen and try to lean a little bit towards the body of the story. Must have transition sentences or words to lead to the body.
        + Pragraph 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6....: The body of the story, talks about the main event of your story. Remember to concentrate on the tense.
       + Paragraph "Last": The Conlusion of the essay. Have to conlude the story and once again tell your experience on the story.

3. Lab Report:
- Lab Report Essay is a type of essay that inform the reader about the details, process, data, outcome, results of an experiment that you did.
- The format of a Lab Report Essay:
      + Tittle: You need to inform people on what you are doing with the experiment. Don't name your Report someting peotic.
      + Abstract: An overview on what you are doing and how you are going to achieve your goal.
      + Introduction: Talk about "Why?" you chose this project and how will this project teach you.
      + Materials and Methods: Talks about what you did. What kind of material you gather, how do you manage to gather those material, what have you done to the raw material that you gather.
      + Results: Talk about the detail results that you get. How many result that you get, Are yo statisfied with that result
      + Conclusion: What you learn from the experiment, does it prove the goal you set?

4. Exam Essay:
- An exam essay is basically could be all of those above.

When I was young, I always want to write a biography about myself like all the great one did. When I went to GRCC and studied ENGL 100, my first essay that I have to turn in is to talk about myself so I am really excited.

My name is An Thien Ha and I am from Vietnam. My name, if you understand Vietnamese means “Blessing from the Sky”. I am currently 17 years old. I have just came to America a few months ago so I am still adapting to the vast cultural environment of America.

In Vietnam, I live with my family, my mom, my dad, my grandpa, my little sister and my little brother. It was not a really big family in Vietnam but it was the best family ever. They encouraged me to go to America to get a better education system. My father used to be studying abroad alot and he is now really successful as a Professor of Marketing and Travels. He is one of my inovation to study here. 

Talk about my own life, I am now currently a student at GRCC. Something about me that could interest other people is that I really like superheroes movies. They just fasinating and I can understand them pretty well. Do I have a girlfriend? Yes I have a girlfriend and we have been going out with each other for nearly 3 years. She is really beautiful and cute no matter what everyone esle said. I love her with all my heart.

My goal of education is being to get a Bachelor degree from America in Human Resource Management to find a better job in Vietnam or maybe I could even get a Master Degree here.

When I have free time, I usually play League of Legends. I am now currently lv 30 :D And at Rank V Silver, working my way up to Gold :D My most played Champion is Udyr Spirit Guard :D 

That is all about myself.