Prompt 10/21-10/28 Your Composition Experience?

This following is based from my unreliable memory of the 2009-2010 school year. Any false information was not intentional and should not be held against me…

I took both English 1010 and 2010, and I am very thankful that I did. When I started back at Weber State in 2009, I had not written an academic paper, or any other type of paper, in about six years. My ACT score had expired, and the Accuplacer put me in English 1010. I really benefited from these two classes, especially because I couldn’t, and still can’t, remember being specifically taught anything about writing essays and papers in public school.

My English 1010 class consisted of a lot of reading essays and responding to them. I believe we used Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink as our primary class text. Our assignments were to read the essays so we could discuss them in class. We then wrote lit reviews on two or three of the articles. I did not realize that they were lit reviews until I was writing this a realized that we took three articles that were similar and explained how they were related and what they were missing. In English 2010, we used They Say / I Say to set up arguments and learn how to add opposing voices to give us more to discuss when writing papers. While I feel I learned a lot from both of these classes, I don’t remember anything specific, but I only blame myself and my poor short term memory for that.

Looking back at my 1010 experience, I believe this was taught in the way it was so that we could understand the lit review process. We had to read texts, prove that we read them by summarizing them, and then apply and connect them to other texts so that we could begin looking at incorporating texts into academic papers. As for my 2010 experience, I feel this was taught in the way it was so that we could learn to use opposing views to strengthen our arguments, and we also learned how to formulate arguments by using boilerplate phrases. Despite my lack of remembering specifics, I do feel I left those classes with a better of understand of college composition.