Letter to future students!

Dear future 1106 Conaway Students,

Welcome to English where you can expect to be writing papers, blogs every class, and interacting with classmates. The workload in this class is bearable, but if you are bad at writing like me, this class can be a little stressful. Here a couple tips for success to ace this class:

1.     Never procrastinate on your papers. Four to ten page papers do not write themselves. They are time consuming and need a lot of attention. As for blogs, always have a consistent time to write them because it can easily be forgotten on top of all your other schoolwork.

2.     Go to the writing center and the class before papers are due. I am not a confident writer, therefore, I went to the writing center for every paper to receive feedback from Virginia Tech peers. It helped to get an insight on what I was writing and the mistakes I wasn’t seeing. In addition, going to the class before the exam is due is helpful, because you can get direct help from the professor himself. He won’ bite. For my last essay, I sent in a copy of my paper, let him read it, give me feedback, and got help to fix up any errors.

3.     Go to class. Not only is going to class respectful, Professor Conaway reviews material that is useful to learn how to write your specific paper. On the downside, class can feel really long and dreadful, especially if you don’t like English, but it is very helpful to go to class in order to write your paper correctly.

English is one of my least favorite subjects. I don’t like writing papers, nor do I like to give presentations. However, Professor Conaway makes an effort to utilize the time in class efficiently, while making it entertaining. The class could be more efficient when students talk amongst each other in groups about their blogs before each class. This stimulates intellectual conversations about the course material, meanwhile, you make friends.

Overall, this class was a little stressful, but time and effort shows within your grade. Never be afraid to ask the professor any questions or help!

Goodluck!

Past 1106 Conaway Student

Writing Feedback

Blog: What’s been most useful in improving in your writing? What would be more helpful, with writing in general and major assignments?

The most useful writing tools was peer review from multiple people. It was impactful to receive feedback from classmates, the writing center, and also my professor. I liked to see how other students wrote which gave me insight to implementing new ideas into my paper. In addition, when going to the writing center and the class before the paper was due, I received feedback from older peers with lots of more writing experience. This helped me understand where I was at with my writing skills.

In the future, it would helpful to see more example writings to get more ideas. The readings for blogs helped me to get a gist of what I should be writing, the purpose of my paper, and ideas for my outline. Receiving more of this would be helpful to future student writers that are clueless (like I was). In addition, it would be helpful to receive templates or outlines for each paper that the students are assigned to write. Sometimes, the paper objective was very broad and confusing. The textbook was helpful because it gave me basic guidelines and rules to follow for each paper. I like rules, outlines, and structure, therefore, I enjoyed utilizing the textbook to write my papers.

Overall, I think that this class improved my writing and gave me more confidence in my style of writing.

Presentation on Psychopathy

My presentation will be on psychopaths. I chose the Research article over the Inquiry essay topic, because I had a more enjoyable time learning about psychopaths; therefore, I feel that the audience would enjoy the presentation equally, judging by my interest in the topic. I also feel that there is more information that I can present with the issue of psychopaths rather than complaining. Not only is it important because psychopathy is very common among the human population, but it is very interesting and many people are not correctly informed of them. It is a very interesting topic to learn about from an audience’s perspective. Compared to the Research article, I will discuss insert more pathos into the presentation. The criminology and the issues of genetics and environment will be a bigger topic than the definition and information. Furthermore, I will also include the different stories on psychopaths to draw the audience’s attention a bit more. In terms of visuals for the presentation, I will have to manipulate the tone of each slide by enhancing dark and evil colors. This will enhance the experience for the audience, because the lack of color and emotions the psychopath feels. The biggest challenge I will face is what information I should put on the slide- what information will need to be cut out or inserted from the research paper. It will also be difficult to make the audience feel that psychopathy is a topic that is not only interesting but also important.