Chapter four starts off with an explanation of the settings that a college student needs to write. I was intrigued by the box labelled “Kinds of Academic Writing” because I didn’t realize that even though I’ve used the majority of those, I never organized them like that. Looking at each of the possibilities, I began to think about the different ways I write for different assignments and it was interesting to me. I really liked the format starting on page 93 of writing a specific thing (i.e. a personal response, summary, critical analysis), the purpose of writing it, and the guidelines. It will be a quick and easy resource to refer back to. Obviously, taking notes and annotating while reading is important, but there are a few ideas on page 113 that I thought were very interesting. The section “Rewriting Lecture Notes and Class Readings in New Ways” has quite a few ideas of how to increase retention and I plan on trying a few of them in the future.
Chapter five is all about description. I enjoy reading the most when the author makes a good use of description, and with that example, I try to be descriptive in my writing so it isn’t boring. The part I found most useful in the chapter was the section “Supporting Details” starting on page 124. It goes through objective and expressive details, how to describe the senses with words, how to replace common words with more descriptive words, and how to effectively use similes and metaphors. That whole section will be great to use in the future. I didn’t really find anything that I would dub as not useful.
Mike's Blog 