Dear Future 110 Students,
In this past quarter of taking English 110 I learned a lot about how to write a good paper. This course was designed well to really teach you the fundamentals of writing. Each course was assigned a theme, mine was technology. At first I didn’t think I would like that there was always a certain topic I had to write about but it actually kept me focused on what it was I was writing about throughout the course. The book Writing Analytically really helps as a reference for your writing. We went over a lot of the material in class but it was nice to also have it when I was working on my assignments. Our first assignment was to find the primary and secondary sources for our research paper. This was difficult t me because I had never done this before so I wasn’t quite sure what they were supposed to be like. The assignment for the research paper was to analyze these sources, which I also found difficult because it was my first time doing that. With the help of my teacher and the course it really helped me understand how to analyze sources and papers which is an extremely useful thing to be able to do. Once I understood it, it made writing a lot easier because I was also analyzing myself as I would be writing. The Commonplace assignments that we did were a little more interesting and fun; once again we were analyzing most of the things we read on there. What you need to know to be successful in this course is to be able to analyze well and really follow the steps you are given to do so. If you do not understand something I suggest asking your teacher and looking over the Writing Analytically book and the Commonplace examples. I would also recommend you get a good primary source, one that you fully understand, and from my experience a really opinionated primary source is better because it is easier to analyze and find what is wrong with it. At first I did not choose a good primary source and I had a lot of trouble with it so I had to choose another one and when I did it made it much easier.
Best of luck in the course!
-Ali