L.+Course+Reflection

Throughout the year I learned in Miss Szymczak’s English class never to use the word you, but use the word one as a substitute. She also taught our class how to correctly use commas. She told us that commas can be used to separate items in a series of three or more items. For example a rainbow is purple, green, and blue. She also showed us what and how to use a claim. A claim is the main point or argument. Claim is also better known as a thesis statement. Logos, ethos, pathos go hand and hand with a Claim. Logos, ethos, pathos basically back up your claim. These tools help in the writer’s persuasion of the reader. Logos, ethos, and pathos are three types of appeals. Your Logos is the reason explained through logic such as data, statistics and facts. Ethos is ones character. You use Ethos to appeal to the readers through making out the writer to be the kind of person the general audience would most likely listen to and believe. Pathos is an appeal used to gain the reader’s attention through connecting on an emotional level, for instance “Believe me, I am an upstanding citizen just like you, so you should listen to what I have to say.” When using pathos you should make the audience feel good about accepting the argument or feel bad about not accepting the argument or both is what miss Szymcak, and miss tousice taught us. When writing a persuasive essay you should build a sense of urgency. Make your audience believe action needs to be taken immediately, before it is too late. You can do this by using what is commonly known as a call to action. Your call to action should basically be a demand. She also taught us when using a nonessential clauses use commas to offset subordinate clauses and phrases. When using essential clauses do not use any commas, for example Aaron, who studied at Harvard, received a high paying job as a scientist. When reading any type of creative writing she taught how to identify what kind of creative writing it was. She taught us how to identify dark romanticism. For instance in dark romanticism, the self is the only thing that can be known or verified. Also in Dark Romanticism most of the attention is paid to the mysteries of life. There is Revenge for human nature, as well as all its struggles. The dark side of dark romanticism involves an emphasis on original sin, a sense of the innate wickedness of human beings, notions of predestination, but it is already determined where one will spend eternity long before he is born. Miss szymcak also taught us the difference in they’re, their, and there. They’re which is a contraction of the two words they are referring to more than one person for example they are going to the movies tonight. Their shows ownership of something for example Aaron and Tamara’s house is theirs. There is referring to location for example the big blue house is over there on Elam Street. We also learned it is extremely important to provide internal documentation. Providing internal documentation is immediately after he quotation or paraphrase, write the author’s or editor’s last name and page number is parentheses. For example “After breakfast I wanted to talk about the dead man and guess how he came to be killed, but Jim didn’t want to” (Mark Twain 45). Pay attention to the fact that there is no punctuation and no comma between the name and the page number, and the punctuation mark goes after the documentation. When making a internal documentation and you have more than one book by the same author, use a short form of the title or the volume number of a collection to distinguish which book you are documenting, for example (Hawthorne, Letter 73) and (Hawthorne, gables 108). We also learned that if you paraphrase an idea or thought instead of quoting it directly, you must give credit for the idea even though the words are all your own, for example “Orwell’s sense of urgency was his desire to expose the myth of the Soviet Union as the perfect social stats” (Oldsey 418) and the paraphrase is Oldsey wants everyone to understand that the Soviet Union was not a perfect society (418). Miss Szymcak also taught us how to correct and avoid making fragment sentences. Who directed the orchestra, is a fragment sentence, and who directed the orchestra that performed at the scope last weekend is the corrected sentence.