Extra Credit Blog: The most important skill

The most important skill I picked up so far in English is probably DGP. It has not only helped me in writing papers in English, but has helped me write more fluently in other classes like science and math. Annotating, decoding and skills like those ones are good and all, but you cannot really apply them to other classes. The skill hasn't stopped in school though, at my house, I have become better at writing. I can now type emails and texts without feeling like I am stupid. The DGP practices we do in our journals have helped me out a great deal. Each time we do one, I feel smarter and feel like I can write confidently and with good puncuation. Hopefully, this is a skill that will remain with me through the rest of highschool, and, maybe, the rest of my life.

Lobsters are tasty

In the discussion, people had very good, meaningful things to say. My favorite comment that was made was near the end of the discussion. It wasn't the most deep statement, but when you thought about it it made a lot of sense and was very clever. It had something to do with how Lobsters are all different and how that is related to people. People are different colors, genders, shapes and sizes and so are lobsters. I can't quite remember, but this statement had something to do with how lobsters are innocent and taken away so suddenly from their home to a life that is slowy stopping. Thats how humans are. With all the things in the world, violence, plain circumstance, and other stuff, we can have our lives taken away from us at anytime with us having a say in it.
     After this discussion, I learned some new things about poetry. I learned how to annotate and analyze it and I learned each poet and poem is trying to express something. Like in Lobsters. This poem makes a somewhat scary, inevitable and true statement but it is a statement we all can embrace. The statement is death is going to happen, whether we like it or not, but we have to accept it and make the best of our lives before that happens, because any day is a day we can stop living.

So many paragraphs, so many skills-Emery Miller

While critiqing the papers in class, I noticed the more commonly made flaws in the papers were things like one sentence of commentary, the embedding was poor, and sometimes things like the people didn't cite a quote or they were using tedious word choice. There were usually small things like that, and most of the papers were written well and with all the material needed on the checklist. These flukes have taught me the skills to write a good paper. It was nice to see people who had papers with mistakes, because then we could learn from it. For instance, I now know that in a paper, quotes should be in chronological order of the book. I also learned that people like good vocabulary in papers from the comments of the students in class.
      With all the good that came from the mistakes of other students, I also learned what kind of stuff I need to work on. One student had commented on how I had poor transitions, and I'm not denying it. I jumped from one topic to the other and I could see it had confused many students while they were reading it. I guess what I need to do to write a better paper is take all the things from the checklist and put them into consideration. I don't like saying this, but for this paper I kind of "winged it". So now, I''m going to look over the checklist and do everything I'm supposed to do, and proofread and not just reword my drafts but actually improve them. If there was a scale of 1-10 for this project based on how well we did on the paper, I'd give myself either a 5 or 6. Its the first 5 part paragraph this year, so I'm not too worried.