M.+Course+Reflection

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This year in English has been very informative and I really learned a lot of new writing techniques. Early on in the year our class started to discuss the ‘American Dream’ and on which main ideas and concepts it was based. I was able to outline my very own ‘American dream’ saying that I want to live free with the same educational opportunities as everybody else. We continued to talk about the topic in our lecture of ‘The Great Gatsby’, a novel in which one of the main characters realizes too late that his (American) dream is just an image of his biggest desire and the reality is more intricate than it seems. After finishing our reading assignment, the class was introduced to the three tyoes of persuasion: logos (logic), pathos (emotional), and ethos (credibility). Logos means to persuade by the use of reasoning while pathos appeals to the reader’s emotions. Ethos means convincing by the character of the author, who tries to impress with his abilities or knowledge. Our class then was supposed to make use of all three persuasive mathods and I wrote my first persuasive essay about celebrities not being role models. Then, each student was allowed to pick a topic that caused national controversy and do research on it. The further task was to take position towards the topic and to persuade the reader that the author’s opinion is reasonable and convincing. In order to do so, I learned how to collect ideas, where to find the right sources, and how to create an outline for an essay. The class then moved on to write a narrative essay, where I wrote about the big decision of going abroad and reviewed last year by telling (narrating)the reader how I ended up doing an exchange year. After that we talked about Edgar Allan Poe and read a couple of his stories and poems. In the course of creating a poem by myself I learned how to differentiate between several figures of speech in Poems such as metaphors or personification. The Self-Reliance project was just about us students, so I wrote and presented a speech about being self-reliant giving an example from my own life. We finished our writing ‘schedule’ with creating a cover letter and a resume as we are on our way to attend college. I wrote to the academic director of theOhioStateUniversityand tried to apply for a permanent placement in college.=====