Essay Week 14

I have had lots of different types of experiences with writing. The first thing I can remember is my sophomore year of high school. I had a really great teacher who taught me a lot about writing. That was the year that I felt like being in all Pre-AP classes would be too heavy of a course load so I decided to take a grade level english class. This was my first time in high school to not take an accelerated level class. It was the weirdest thing ever. For the first time I was surrounded by people who really did not care whether or not they did good in their classes. Many of the people in that class did not care about getting into college one day. My teacher could tell from the beginning that I had different passions that the other students in my class. I learned a lot about creativity and writing in his class. He was the one I went to a couple years later to edit my college application essays. He challenged me a lot more because I would often come to him with help on my assignments and he taught me a lot about taking ownership over my writing. We wrote a very lengthy essay over To Kill a Mockingbird in that class. Whenever I think of that book I think of his class because that was the first time I studied it in school. In college I have not had too much experience with writing. This class has honestly been my favorite (which is why I am taking it as a second class with Professor Gibbs) because of all of the freedom to be so creative with writing. I took my college english classes in highschool so I never really had the OU english experience. I will definitely miss this class and getting to write creatively and I hope that when I graduate I will still be able to write. Something I really try to do is write people letters. I love snail mail and will probably try to use it more after I graduate!

Image Information: Cover of To Kill a Mockingbird taken from Wikipedia

Essay Week 13

I absolutely love this photo because it is definitely something that is such a struggle in today’s world. I am definitely victim to this sometimes because I often struggle with correct punctuation when writing. I’ve gotten a lot better, however, with using correct punctuation in texts. Texting has become such a HUGE thing in our generation that it seems people have lost their ability to correctly type. I see people making these common punctuation mistakes so much. I love this cartoon because when I first looked at it, I actually thought it was going to be something clever and have cats and dogs falling from the sky. I thought maybe it would be talking about people taking things literally. I have seen something similar to this that says “let’s eat grandpa” and “let’s eat, grandpa.” Then the caption says “punctuation can save someone’s life.” I thought that was pretty hilarious. I know that one year my grandma visited for a week and made me super paranoid about correcting people about the correct form of me and I when grouped with other people’s names. It made me crazy about it which makes me constantly correct my friends about it. I feel like texting could be a small contributor to why people are so lazy about using correct grammar and forms of words. I think the thing that drives me the craziest about texting is when people use abbreviations like “rn” after typing a long paragraph. I just think that if you can type out every other word in your paragraph, you can definitely type out the words right and now. I will definitely never understand that. All these things are frustrating  but I am definitely not one to talk because I still make the same mistakes over and over in all my stories in this class. I especially use comma splices too much. I think that as long as people know what they need to work on a change can eventually be made.

Image Information: Cats and Dogs taken from Online Course Lady