How To Write Good:
Micca's Official Guide to Writing with Authority in College.
By: Micca June Laier
My Background Writing:
Greetings, my name is Micca and, in this blog, I will try to give you the reader a guide to writing with authority. Like most community college students, I went straight from high school into the world of college writing pretty unconfidently. I had previously taken AP classes that were college level but felt as if all they prepared me for was getting a certain score on the end of year test. Writing at a college level felt like all smoke and mirrors... a secret code all the scholars writing academic journals were taught that wasn't public to students like me. BUT THIS IS INCORRECT! There is hope and I HOPE (heh...) to show you that by the end of this blog.
HOLD YOUR HORSES!!!
Before I give you a step by step, let me give you some pre-writing advice.
What is every student's biggest enemy? If your immediate thought is procrastination, I believe you are in the majority. Personally, me and procrastination go way back. My biggest writing tip I can give is not so much how to write, but where to do so. I have found in my experience having to write essays and projects, I get more work done when I am not in my own room. When I'm in my room/house I know exactly what to do to distract myself from doing what I need to do. And when I don't want to do something, consciously or not I will try to not do it to the best of my ability. SO! My simple solution: get out of the house and go anywhere public. The reasoning behind this is because if you get up and make the conscious decision to use gas money or walk in the heat to do an assignment, you're going to do it. Trust me, I'm sitting at the library writing this and if that wasn't the case I'm not too sure this would have even been written.
Me when I have to do the assignment I put off:
BREAKING DOWN EVERYTHING YOU "KNOW" ABOUT WRITING.
Understanding discourse communities...
(what is a discourse community even...)
Understanding discourse communities is crucial for first year college students to understand if they want to effectively write in their various classes. Discourse communities, as Melzer puts it, are communities with the same, "...methods of communicating, the same genres, and the same lexis (specialized language" (pg. 103). As you may have already guessed, there are hundreds upon thousands of these communities that all have different types of people and expectations surrounding them.
FOR EXAMPLE:
An assignment from your 18th century Spainard poetry class is going to have a far different audience compared to your organic chemistry class.
Another question Melzer urges his readers to ask is, “What conventions of format, organization, and style does the discourse community value?” (pg. 111). After establishing the audience you are writing for, you must then consider which format would be the most accessible and digestible for your specific discourse community. With all of this in mind, you're set up much better compared to reading the rubric and hastily putting quotes in places you're not too sure they belong.
04
Item name
This one had me from the first five minutes.
05
Item name
This one had me from the first five minutes.