hayleyscountrysideblog

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Grammar Again

I recently had to do a persuasive speech for my speech class and it took me awhile to come up with a topic. The professor gave us two days to email him and start writing- I began panicking. It, then, occurred to me that I should do something that is fresh, relevant and useful. I picked “Why you should always be concerned about using proper grammar.” Whether you are in an interview or talking to someone who is coherent, it is so important make sure that you can talk to them without making yourself look bad. Recently, having multiple job interviews, I realized that it’s all about your use of words and the way you utilize them. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, where everyone had that redneck accent and talked grammatically incorrect. I was one of the only people from my high school to go off to college and my high school worried more about who had a nicer truck, rather than education. Coming to college was a huge culture shock. In my first speech here I used the sentence “Me and Momma” as an opener and my professor tore me apart for it, as he should. After taking this class, that kind of sentence is enough to make me cringe and wonder how the heck I used to live like that. It’s just the simple things though. Everyone should always make a point to say “Isaiah and I” rather than “Me and Isaiah .” It is so easy but it is also so common for people anymore to overlook. Another thing I have been noticing is that everyone back home always uses the wrong “their, there and they’re” WE ARE HOW OLD NOW and it sticks out like a sore thumb and is so unattractive. I’ll tell you right now that is not how you can win a job, class or romantic partner over by any mean at all. Professor Orin opened up a lot of things for me when it came to how I talked in real life and how I talked on my paper life. I have learned a vast amount of skills I have implanted from our exercises into real life and I couldn’t be habppier!

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Mistakes

It’s so easy to overlook and forget mistakes we make in our writing. We tend to write very quickly and fast, then just assume we are correct the first time- but that is the furthest thing from right. Even the best make silly mistakes and its OK as long as you know what you did wrong. I enjoyed the assignment Professor Orin gave us where we can reflect on the faults we made. It not only gave us break, but time to slow down and think “huh, maybe I’m not all that after all.” Originally,I wrote about how I didn’t make any mistakes. I was so confident that I did everything correct and after I read back my piece and the original assignment- I chuckled a little. I had more than 3 prominent errors in my cooking book exercise. We, as humans, make mistakes everyday and obviously that is natural and OK, but we need to make sure we correct them or be honest about it, not just in our writing but it is a life lesson as well. The reflection assignment was about honesty and try to help yourself, rather than get a grade or show the professor what you can do, but instead it was about what you can’t do and need help on. I think this is a great idea and it was about in the middle of the semester too, so it gives you time to recover from your mistakes and try again. I believe it should be implemented into ever lesson plan to help students teach themselves and make them laugh at themselves, rather than be told what they did faulty, they have to figure it out themselves. As the semester goes on, I know I get more and more careless and professors keep piling it on. I am thankful that this assignment taught me to slow down and actual read what I am typing out. I took this advice and ran with it on my legal paper for Legal Ethics and Professor Lerner was so impressed, so thank you Professor Orin!!!

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MLA or APA

I am not one for change in almost any aspect of my life. Trying new things is always more than a challenge for me, and that’s how I approached this lesson about APA. My whole life I was taught the ways of MLA and have stuck with it ever since, and I think most people can say the same. Being a political science major, we have never really had to use anything else. I learned a lot about APA and Chicago. I always wondered why my friends who are in nursing are such masters at it and prefer it, but its because it is more directed toward medicine and psychology- two things I am an alien to. I learned how to incorporate a cover page into the paper. This was something I had to then recently put into action in my Research and Design Class for the Poli Sci. The professor said we were to use APA and APA only. I went about this assignment from what I learned from Professor Orin’s class and made sure I did everything precise. I think a lot of what we learn in this class goes into our everyday lives and will continue to. It is just mastering the basics of it and then you learn as you go. I am not an English major and almost every lesson we have had in this class related to my other classes and came in handy, even receiving 100′s and various compliments on how I went about it. I thank Professor for not only giving these lessons out in an easy way for us to grasp, but also being extremely available and helpful to us all when doing so. I think the Skype sessions help so much and actually makes us realize we know more than we think.

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Citations

Everyone in their lifetime has had to write a works cited page and honestly, it can get very irritating if you don’t know what you are doing or haven’t properly mastered the art of it. These past few weeks I learned how important it is to write an in-text citation, which is something I never really have done before. It came in handy though, because I feel like every time I learn something new in this class, it correlates into my other classes so it always works out. After we learned how to do this, I had to write a paper for my law class about this different rules lawyers can and can’t do. Instead of a page at the end, my professor wanted us to simply cite the pages we used and paragraphs since we all used the same book, would be easier to relate. When I got the paper back, she complimented me on my ability and understanding of how to implement my citations in the proper format, and I solely give props to this class because Professor Orin did a good job at explaining and giving examples of how to do this properly, along with the book that goes along with this class. These citations are a lot easier and I think more important than actual pages because nobody wants to scroll through 5 or 6 different pages of different websites. It takes too much time and it’s too much information when you could easily provide where you got your information in a few words. I, also, had to utilize this new found tool in my White Collar Crime class when we do discussion boards every week, this past one he wanted us to find two different sources pertaining to bank fraud and give them in an in-text citation since with is merely a blog rather than a paper. It came easy to me as well and I am thankful that this is something we went over and practiced in class. It will come in handy when I am writing case briefs in the near future for my career.

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Small Details

It’s amazing how quickly we overlook small things in books. For example, we had to an assignment that dealt with cooking instructions and the one thing that I missed completely was to put everything in alphabetical order. I guess that might be my lack of cooking skills and desire to cook to realize that that is literally how people find things so quickly in any book similar. For me, I take for granted the simple things in writing, like punctuation and formatting. We are so used to robotic-ally doings things the way we learned in like 6th grade we forget that it actually helps us as we go on. Things like alphabetization, Times New Roman, 12 font, etc. It makes it a global understanding for everyone to be able to access easily. Growing up, we think that the things we learn are only learned in our environment. We think that the books we have to read and the lessons we learn were only taught in our high school, but that comes to end when we go off to college and have the same lessons there, only this time we are from all over the globe, with the same background. I guess I kind of just came to an epiphany with English throughout these past few lessons. It is so important to grasp the minor concepts in order to communicate properly with everyone else. We all learn the same things and so it makes you want to master it more and more, because it’s not that hard and will make everything in your life easier as time goes on. So, remembering small details has become so key to me.

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Don't Pick One Side

We were all raised differently. We all have our different hometowns, cultures, media outlets, etc. No two people can say they have the same views in everything they do and like- because it is just not possible. With this recent election, I think it brought out a lot of people’s roots and things they wouldn’t usually say or do. I am talking about being biased and sexist. As history exclaims, it is so easy to overlook when you read something sexist. I mean this in text books and TV shows about how it’s always a male as president or as the CEO and if it not, it’s usually to portray some type of joke they have on women. More recently this has changed. More women are in law school now than men, we have multiple women who attempted to run for president and are in high up positions. The joke has run dry, but sadly we live in a world where some men will never let it go. It’s hurtful and it’s disheartening when women do so much for this world for it to be overlooked so quickly. That’s why we need to think about the sentences we say and we put out there. I guess this doesn’t really only go for women because men are victims too, but it is more prominent towards females since they haven been the leading sex in history. We, also, need to eliminate the act of being bias. It is no secret politics has gotten the best of in this past election so now everytime I log onto twitter or Facebook, it appears to be “well the leftists think this and are wrong because..” or “the conservatives are out of line for implementing this idea into society..” and so on and so forth. Where does that take us? So far, I have seen this country go even more backwards than ever in my lifetime with this mindset and everyone is guilty! If we took time out of our day to really see what others had to say and put our views in the back of our minds, we may be able to get somewhere. That is why I, who wants a future in politics, believes it is good to stay in the middle when talking to others and not sway one way because that’s when you start to derail into one side. It is not always possible, but this country needs to start to try.

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Formatting Saves Lives

The way we write things and how we format it is so detrimental to every single class we have to take in college and even in high school. Each field asks for something different like for example, most English classes ask you to write in MLA format which consists of Times New Roman,12pt font and double spacing. It is known and under the category for ‘humanities’. It is common for most to not even know how to write a paper in any other way, heck some might not even know any others exist! Recently Professof Orin taught us about MLA, APA and Chicago. As I stated before MLA is typically the most common; clear and easy to read with a set format. I guess I have never really dabbled in APA is because it is more science and psychology oriented. They use a cover page to present the findings they are about to talk about. I think I’ve taken maybe like 3 science classes in my life and none of them required written paper. It was mainly tests and labs we had to attend to get the grade. Scientists usually don’t assign much because they like hands on learning and that’s the best way to really teach different experiments. Chicago formatting deals more along the lines of businesses and history- again not my strong suit. I honestly didn’t even know Chicago was a thing until this lesson. I just thought it was for show, haha, like no one actually took the time to use it but instead just merely made it an option. Along with those we write blogs, journal entries and discussion posts. There are so many different ways to get your ideas out to your instructor or the world. It is so important to do your research in whatever you’re about to write about and how to present them, because it takes more than just a google article to really grasp the different ways and concepts. For my research and design class, we are to do our final research in APA formatting and it makes sense because we are actually researching it like a scientist (political scientist that is) and I’m thankful this lesson was presented to me now, so that I’m not at a complete loss as to where to start and how to lay it out.

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A Way With Words

The use of negative and positive tones have a huge effect on everyday life because it can dictate a conversation to go well or to go really south. As young adults, and well as humans in general we tend to not think much before we speak. A lot of people are very unaware of the way they word things in general, too. I fell victim of this negative toning/connotation. This was brought to my attention when I Skyped with my professor for our oral examination. Just the word “hobo” or “bum” can simply change the outlook of what you are trying to tell someone or get at. You don’t always know the back story of people and towns or anything really so if you try to avoid words that bring the conversation down, it always works out better. I realized my lack of knowledge the other day when I was doing an assignment for my Research and Design and we had to pick out the negative toning of the sentence and how it could be election changing if certain words were taken away or taken out. “Talkative, chatty, conversational” are all good words to use when you describe someone who is good at speaking and portraying their words in a responsive and attentive manner, but using nosy makes them sound bad. Even if that person is nosy, it is not good to state it about them since it can be looked at in a bad light- rather than good. I started to use this in my everyday language and speaking, because it will help me in the future if I am giving a speech (especially in my political career I want to pursue) to not talk badly about something or someone when I really don’t mean to. The connotation just plays a huge factor when dealing with feelings and outlooks. Professor gave us an example “Riverside is an uppity neighborhood, but the rent is cheap.” By saying something is cheap, it automatically makes your mind think of poor quality, rather than something you feel you would be getting the best out of for your money. Instead they could use a word like “inexpensive”. That way it almost makes you want to jump on that deal. Therefore, wording is way more important than I ever thought it could be.

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Out of Touch

The use of semicolons are so prominent in everyday writing but it is something that is so quickly overlooked by many, including myself. I tend to forget the proper use of the punctuation especially with the semicolon because it can easily be replaced and often is, by the regular comma. The idea and separation of two independent clauses is where the semicolon is implemented.  It is funny because I take a white collar crime class here online at UNF and at the end of each week, we are to comment and give feedback to two of our fellow classmates and it is interesting to see the repetition of the comma when the students are trying to get their ideas out. They have two relating ideas about different bank frauders and end up connecting them or making them separate ideas, when in reality a simple semicolon could've done the trick. I think biggest thing this lesson has done has been improving my speeches. They way I used to write them would be full text and I'd read it like a script, hardly making eye contact. I would continuously look down and try to get it out word for word, making it way more difficult than it had to be. My speech professor then came up to me and suggested I make it easier on myself by only using phrases. From there I would utilize the semicolon. I would write out my first idea and with my memory I would already know that there is a relating idea coming after the punctuation. It helped take the pressure off of trying to focus on not messing up on one word and throwing myself off. The knowledge I am obtaining in this class has truly helped me in so many aspects relating to my education here at UNF. For the first time I find myself catching silly errors or rereading things I have written to see if it not only makes sense in general, but grammatically as well. We, as students, are so quick to stick to the basic stuff we have learned and are afraid to try new things. I feel keep I am finally breaking out of that shell.

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Implementing Grammar

It never occurred to me just how out of touch with correct grammar and proper terms of English I was until this class. I am a Pre-Law major and recently this semester I had to take a course called Research and Design. The first homework was a breeze. I looked at it and thought “man this class is going to be a piece of cake.” Then, the second assignment hit. We had to point out the independent and dependent variables. My eyes lit up and my memory flashed back to learning this in Professor Orin’s class merely weeks before. I was grateful because the Research book that was given showed no examples but a definition, where as my English class and book provided laid out examples and specific sentences that we had to break down and figure out. My understanding was so much more clear and concise than what my Professor had attempted to teach in class prior to the assignment. The class is based upon politics so a lot of it looked like the dependence of age upon whether they would vote and how they would vote. Using examples from Orin's class, made it easy for me to pick out the cause and affect of the different variables. It also threw in antecedent and intervening variables, as well. Luckily, our book shows different examples of that, too. By the time the exam came around, I actually aced it. I had never been so nervous for something in my life because I really didn't feel like I grasped the content as much as I had hoped to by the time the examination was given out, but it turned out that it was mostly grammar and how different punctuations and variables effect politics and how we speak to our crowd. I couldn't of been more thankful for how much Professor Orin drilled these different skills into our head. I thought to myself "If I've gotten this far without having to know the difference, I shouldn't need to start now." But it turns out this English class couldn't have had better timing coming into my life, seeing as I need it more than ever now that my political career begins to really start and how important it is to grasp content thoroughly.