Week 1 Self-Assessment

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Writing 39C is my first writing course in college; I skipped 39A and 39B due to my AP scores in high school. Therefore, nearly all of my writing knowledge and habits, both good and bad, sprouted from my two AP English courses in 11th and 12th grade. While I do not expect to apply these skills in 39C, I anticipate that they will provide me with a crude foundation for searching for and analyzing research topics.

 

The essays assigned by my AP courses were mostly expository essays, which required reading novels or passages and writing an essay analyzing the text or arguing a point. My teachers stressed making clear and coherent essays, and encouraged students to follow a general template for them:

 Fig 1. Bid4Papers, Expository Essay Structure. Bid4Papers, FrogProg Limited, 2019, bid4papers.com/blog/expository-essay/Links to an external site.. Accessed 9 October 2020.

 

  • The introduction consists of a summary of the passage, a reiteration of the prompt, and a concise thesis in four or five sentences. 

 

  • Two or three body paragraphs contain a topic sentence and a few quotes, followed by a short analysis of each quote and its connection to the thesis. 

 

  • The concluding paragraph recalls the thesis and the points made and wraps up the essay with an underlying message or theme.

 

The majority of papers I wrote during my two AP classes roughly followed that formula. Due to how frequently I used the same outline, it became natural for me to fall back on it whenever I stumbled on an essay in high school, which led to many of my papers being very similar in length and structure. Over two years, I slowly improved my efficiency in drafting expository essays. I condensed my essays into more direct and concise ideas using fewer sentences, rather than padding my word count by rewording an idea across multiple sentences. I dedicated less time to searching for evidence, and more time to weaving a solid analysis with what I had. While I am trying to break away from the chains of my high school style, remnants of it still remain in my writing.

 

As I have little experience in writing research papers, I do not expect to translate my knowledge and strategies from high school to 39C easily. Scanning through multiple articles and typing multiple pages over a few weeks is vastly different than scribbling a paper in an hour. However, I see 39C’s projects as larger, more complex versions of my essays of the past. There are more sources to find, more paragraphs to type, and more headaches to handle, but the basic instructions are similar. My high school writing has given me a fundamental idea of how to dig through sources and fit them into my writing, and I hope to put this knowledge into practice in the upcoming research projects.

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