Compare and Contrast #2

At the beginning of ninth grade, I had no idea what to expect. After it sunk in that I was finally in high school, I noticed the work was getting harder and more vigorous. I also noticed that my writing was really improving. The techniques I was learning in Essay Writing were helping my organization and making open response paragraphs and essays much easier. At the beginning of the school year my writing was far from where it is now.



The first thing I was taught to do through elementary and middle school was write a sentence or two to "hook" the reader. To write some sort of visual imagery to interest the person reading your essay. However, the first thing I learned here was not to do that. The very first thing I was taught in Essay Writing was that an essay is a person's thoughts or opinions about a subject. Therefore, the first sentence you write should be an opinionated statement about your topic, not visual imagery, or questions, or anything like that.



The next thing I learned about writing this year was a whole new set of introductions and conclusions. In our text book "Write to the Point!" there was an entire chapter on each. It mentioned a few different ways of writing introductions, and few different ways of writing conclusions. My teacher was quick to point out which ones he wanted us to use and which ones weren't actually very good. For example, the summary conclusion--my former go-to format. I also used to have a lot trouble coming up with introductions that didn't sound completely disjointed from my thesis. However, I find myself getting better and better with every essay I write. I think my writing has improved alot in that respect.

Another part of my writing that I'm proud to say has improved is the structure and orginazation. Last year the whole CM, CD thing was a little fuzzy. I didn't really understand why it mattered, or how to use it properly. With someone new explaining it, and showing me how to use it properly, it became very easy to use. I like the way it sturctures my open response paragraphs and body paragraphs in essays. Having a clear format to follow makes writing essays much, much easier. However, there are also other formats that I've learned about. For example, compare and contrast essays. Learning an esay way to write these has been a blessing. Speaking form my past experience, compare and contrast essays are the hardest to write. When we started to talk about them in class I thought it would be a real drag. However, it turned out that learning two different ways to write them and about how the thesis differs from other theses cleared the whole thing up. Looking at the example outlines in the textbook made the whole thing way easier.

Which leads me to perhaps the most important part of an essay--the thesis. The compare and contrast thesis was very interesting to look at. I'm really glad we had time to talk about it in class, because at first it's really confusing. It is a two part thesis--first you state the two things being compared, and then you make a statement about what you are going to concentrate on. For example, "Although both "Wall-E" and "By the Waters of Babylon" are both stories about the future of makind, By the Waters of Babylon gives a more realistic look at our future." Learning about how to write these has made my life so much easier. My theses in general have gotten better and much easier to write.

I am so glad that I was able to improve my writing this year. I think I've really improved from my days of bad topic sentences and disjointed introductions. I can't wait to learn more!

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