Analysis Of The Book ' Great Writers '

The essay I was assigned is “How To Write With Style” by Kurt Vonnegut. After reading the essay, I found that a theme that would best summarize it is “effective communication. Kurt Vonnegut writes in his essay about how one should write in order to attract the reader and effectively communicate your thoughts. His advice to writing as he calls it “How To Write With Style” provides an insight to some elements that allows the writer to effectively communicate his thoughts and be true to him or herself. Keeping it simple, Have the guts to cut, Sound like yourself, Say what you mean to say, Pity the readers are his advice to writers to become effective writers. After reading the essay, I looked at several stories and poems that shared a similar

On February 22, 2016 author John Warner published an article on Just Visiting entitled “Kill the 5-Paragraph Essay.” Warner creatively talks about how rudimentary of a structure this type of essay holds. Writers are locked inside a cage of regulations and guidelines making them unable to write the essay as they please, but rather having to piece together regulated sentences and paragraphs because that’s what they have been told would score high on certain test questions. The article targets people of all kinds, but is more directed towards early college aged students. The purpose behind this article is to get them to expand their horizon, disregard all the regulations they have been previously taught and start to write in a much more open-minded sense.

As Goshgarian states in Exploring Language, “Most college writing is an exercise in persuasion – an attempt to influence reader’s attitudes about the subject matter” (90). In order to effectively persuade our audience, we must not only write skillfully, but also be able to send a clear, interesting, and concise message. In chapter two of the above mentioned book, Goshgarian provides various articles with insights on how to improve our writing. I found “Beware the Trap of Bore-geous Writing”, by Ayelet Waldman; “The Case for Short Words”, by Richard Lederer; and “Saying is Believing”, by Patricia O’ Conner very interesting as they all highlight the importance of writing clearly and provide valuable advice on how to do it better. However, I personally found “Saying is Believing”, by Patricia O’Conner, to be the most helpful resource due to the reasons I intend to explain in this essay.

The significance of the title, “The Story We Tell”, in my opinion refers to the historical narrative told from the viewpoint of the victor, the White Americans. Throughout our K-12 education we often learn history from the viewpoint of the Euro-American or Whites. This creates a false truth, creating a racial hierarchy and justification for wrong doing. We often hear that history repeats itself, which as we see with the mistreatment of non-whites, this is true. We only know, what we know… we need to be taught the true history that took place from all aspects, not just from the viewpoint of the victor.

Teaching the process of a five-paragraph essay seems to be a popular strategy when it comes to teaching new writers; however, not everyone agrees that five-paragraph essays are the best way to go about introducing the writing process. John Warner, author of “Kill the 5-Paragraph Essay” believes the process gives writers little freedom and is a “tool for the worst of teachers to hide amongst the good.” On the other hand, Kerri Smith, author of “In the Defense of the Five-Paragraph Essay” claims “students who know the five-paragraph essay intimately are more prepared to take on the challenge of college-level writing.” Both first-year composition professors make great arguments; however, Warner’s article seems to argue his point effectively.

This is because as writers, most of us become frighten to what our readers will think of “this” and “that”. With this constant way of thinking our writing will never improve because we won’t be interested in the actual story being implemented, instead we will substitute that attention towards the thoughts of our readers. Just like King claimed, “Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need of define some sort of writing as “good” and other sorts as “bad’, is fearful behavior” (King, 128). This argumentative analogy demonstrates how constant fear becomes the dilemma between a reader’s decision to continuously keep reading or to put the book back on the shelf. Constant fear in any writer’s report, becomes the cause of having the need to go to thesaurus to change their vocabulary, yet having no idea if the “substituted” word works. This becomes useful in realizing that one must be able to write without that constant deliberation of questioning ourselves as writers. Perspicuously, another tip that would be useful is having the proper organization/style. Every writer without counting if they are authors or not, are prone to having a style, some sort of organization that defines them. However, to many unassertive eyes’, difficultness appears when knowing the length of your paragraphs. With knowing the length of your paragraphs, it all comes down to one simple portion of this whole writing process? A simple portion that consists of the topic. If you are writing an expository prose, you shall know that the paragraphs will be a bit longer than the rest. Expository proses, whom are continuous paragraphs that “contains a topic sentence followed by others which explain or amplify the first” (King, 130). Nonetheless, you would never find an expository writing piece with two sentences per paragraph; however, what about fictional stories? Within

My past writing life has allowed me to learn and grow and develop my voice. The more I write, the more I understand what my voice is and how to use it. Trying to restrict myself to the five-paragraph essay structure inhibits my voice and makes it increasingly more difficult to showcase who I am as a writer in the world. When I remove that structure, I believe my voice can be heard loud and clear. When I write, I can explain my thoughts and ideas succinctly, and I believe that allows me to accomplish what I am trying to do more quickly. I am better at communicating through writing, which has been and will hopefully continue to be a great asset for me as I go through life.

Throughout my time writing at the City College of New York, I experienced a slow and dramatic transition to my first semester of this college course. During that time, I've learned from several feedback and lessons from certain peers and my professor. Because of the strict comments written in my drafts by my professor, a few helpful suggestions to include in my writing, and a few miserably failures, I was able to see how my writing and habits have changed during the duration of this course. Back in high school, I was always comfortable writing only five paragraph essays (Introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion), but I've never expected to write something more complex. Here, I was encouraged to include as much detail as I can instead of writing something vague

It is essential to understand that classes taken in grade school do not give students a full understanding of each subject. With the topic of writing, there will always be a new lesson to learn, an aspect to improve, or a differing way to explain. Author Craig Vetter states in Bonehead Writing, “This is your enemy: a perfectly empty sheet of paper. Nothing will ever happen here except what you make happen.” Each story, essay, or response comes from a writer’s experiences. With each attempt at a new piece comes an underlying story of emotions the writer is facing. Each person’s writing is unique and the ideas people have are related to their past experiences and what they believe to be familiar with when deciding which writing style to use. As a high school student, I have learned many things about writing that helped me become the improved writer I am today, but the most essential advice I have received is practice makes perfect. Although there is no actual perfect way of writing, I have discovered that each essay I write, my writing improves. It is easier to spot mistakes, find areas to improve, and ponder elevated word choice to use.

It is the characters that make a story and they are what convey the feeling needed for the message contained in the story. Any great writing that contains characters provides their full, rounded personalities. These personal descriptions are averaged to form the classification of each person introduced. The “good guys,” the “bad guys” and all the other titles are classifications. In example, there were many types of characters in Elie Wiesel’s “Night.” Among these are the main protagonists, antagonists, and prophetic characters.

The Art Museum of South Texas in Corpus Christi was an experience in itself. I went to the Art Museum of South Texas on July 28th in part to do the first portion of the assignment, but also to celebrate my moms' birthday. I was impressed by the museums multiple sculptures and oil paintings. Although what caught my attention was the exposition of the entries in this years Visionaries Youth Art Contest. The exposition is an art contest for students in elementary through high school, with different themes every year. The theme for this year was about the environment of Corpus Christi.

As a writer there are many elements of writing that I struggle with, especially when composing an essay. When writing an essay, there are usually many skills that need to be used in order to be successful with the writing assignment. Many times in writing I struggle with explaining and fully developing the supporting details and ideas in my essay. I would also like to improve on incorporating clear topic sentences and concluding sentences, connecting my paragraphs ideas back to my thesis. Lastly, improvement can be made in my writing by avoiding awkward or wordy sentences. Writers face numerous challenges in their writing but strive to overcome or improve these challenges with each piece they write.

Another problem that I’m having in my writing that I would like to improve next marking period is using less words. I tend to use too many words and make my writing too wordy. It’s not that I repeat sentences, I just tend to add too many details that aren’t even needed. I plan on fixing this problem by always going through my writing and seeing which words I could take out that would not make the sentence any different. I believe that writing is all about quality and not quantity. Someone could have a 5 page essay, but if there’s no quality in the essay then the essay is useless.

A writer can accomplish composing a “good” piece of writing by making sure he has logical reasoning behind their statements, by making it noticeable when they transition into explaining another point, and when by not letting their personal feelings be put ahead of their logical reasons, and by making the reader question them. These are not only important for the author but it is also important for the reader. If a author does not have a logical reasoning behind his statements than the reader can not take it as a credible source and they will most likely not believe it. Transitions are a huge part of good writing also because if a reader can not tell when your last point ends and the next one starts

Writing an essay is like constructing a building. They are similar from their overall strong and beautiful structures to their small units like bricks to the building and words to the essay. Grammar glues all the words together in nice order to make sentences, which are put in the structure to make a good essay. Like many other students who are not native speakers, I do not have a strong English foundation, but I am still able to make a great structure for my essays. However, much like people do not feel comfortable living in houses that look good on the outside but have holes in the walls, ugly light fixtures, and other terrible details on the inside, people do not like to read essays that have strong