1. Dear Friend,
How’s your senior year of high school going? I’m excited to hear that you will be coming to UNCC next semester! It’ll be great seeing another familiar face around campus. We have a lot to catch up on! I haven’t seen or heard from you in a while so I’m writing just to update you on how I’m doing here at college and hopefully help prepare you on what you have to look forward to when you officially become a 49er next semester! Well, first off I have to tell you about one of my favorite classes. It’s my English 1102 class. You will have to take that your second semester here so I recommend that you get Ms. Ingram. She’s really chill and laid back, but she knows her stuff when it comes to writing, grammar, etc. I know I’ve learned a lot from her class this semester. One major thing that I’ve learned this semester is MLA. Remember having to do that in high school? Well, try and learn in while you still can because trust me, you continue to use it here at college as well. I am having to use it for a research paper I am writing in English 1102. What I like about this class though however is that Ms. Ingram does not expect me to know every last detail when it comes to MLA. She is willing to teach me the rules if I am willing to learn. One thing that I have always struggled with was intext citations, but after Ms. Ingram explained to the class how to do it, I was good to go! We took maybe one or two full days just refreshing our memory and learning the new rules on MLA. It was really helpful! The great thing is that she doesn’t just give us the rules, but she has us do little activities so that we can apply what we learned. It was really helpful. I know learning this stuff now while I am still a freshman is very useful because I am sure that I will need to use MLA format when writing papers in my other classes. Well, I have gone on and on about this English class that I’m taking, but I hope you take my advice and get Ms. Ingram next semester when you get here. You won’t regret it! Can’t wait to see you around school!
Love,
Seiko
2. For my annotated bib/blogger, I went through a lot of trouble just picking out a topic. My first initial topic that I wanted to research was how watching what you eat and dieting causes stress for females. This topic was something I really wanted to do because I know how stressful it can be, but since I couldn’t find any good articles or books on this topic I decided I needed to change it. So then my second choice was the negative affects coffee has on college students. It sounded pretty interesting at the time because I drink coffee almost every night when I am up late studying in the library, but I just couldn’t get into the topic because it wasn’t as personal to me like something related to dieting and body image. So, as I’m sure you have already been seeing the trend so can guess, I changed my topic again for the third and final time. My topic is how the media affects females in our society today. I chose this topic because I am honestly affected by this every single day. I see a commercial with a thin girl and wish my body looked like that. I look through a magazine and wish my body looked like that the unrealistically thin model. I am constantly thinking of how I can better my body image. Not necessarily because I am fat, but because I have seen better and want that. My targeted audience is other females who are in the same position as myself and also males who wish us females could attain such a high standard. I feel like we all know about Photoshop and all the technology that agencies use to make these individuals in the media look better, but we still wish we looked like that. I just want to prove both to guys and to girls that it’s almost an unrealistic goal to look like the people we see in the media. Personally, this is a very risky topic for myself because I do not like to put myself out there and let people know what I feel about myself, but if David Seidel could get personal in his book Peace, Butter and Jelly, then so can I. I am still working on my draft and it obviously isn’t an easy write for me, but it’s a challenge that I am willing to take. I realized how difficult it is to write about something you feel strongly about. I thought it would be easy, but I realized that actually, the more personal it is, the harder it is more me to write about it because I know other people will read it. From this paper, I honestly just want my readers to realize how body image isn’t everything and to not compare themselves with the people that we see in movies, on commercials, in magazines, etc. But not only do I want my audience to realize that but I am also trying to convince myself the same thing as I write this paper. It is safe to say, that this is also a huge learning process for myself. I obviously still have a lot of revising i have to do before the final portfolio, but I am working on it.
3. I enjoyed reading Peace, Butter and Jelly. I thought it was great how David came to our class to answer all the questions that we had for him after reading his book as well. It was interesting because it wasn’t like a boring novel (like most English teachers would make us read) but it had cooking recipes, poems, and personal stories of David and his life. It was different, and I think that’s what stood out to me the most. It was an easy read because it had a variety of writing techniques incorporated into one book.
4. Writing and reading
Things I never could enjoy
Not until this class.
