engl101 first assignment

1. My name is Chris Parker and I'm from New York, proud of it, and I went to Mepham High School on Long Island. I came to the University of Maryland to study Cognitive Neuropsychology because I am interested in becoming a psychiatrist one day.

2. In high school I did a lot of writing for most of my classes, DBQ's for social studies, research papers for science and psychology, and of course writing in English. The only real structured writing I've done at the University of Maryland so far was the essay we had gotten on the first day of English class. Outside of school I did not write very much.

3. When writing a paper I usually brain storm about it first then outline my thoughts and then streamline it to fit the theme of the paper. I find that the easiest part of writing a paper is writing the body paragraphs where all the information is, but find that the hardest part for me is jsut getting the whole thing started.

4. The type of writing that has given me the most satisfaction is free response, or broader topics of discussion to start that may widdle down something very specific.

5. The longest and most challenging paper I have ever had to write was probably at DBQ in social studies that had about 10 or 11 documents on it and I had to use all of them. I did my usual outline and streamline but I learned that it takes me a long. . .long time to write papers like that and I have to give myself plenty of time to write them.

6. If I remember learning anything about writing from other courses that I found useful it was defineitly outlining.

7. As a writer I feel as though I have a lot of ideas that could be written about but I have a severe weakness when it comes to applying them to a task or a prompt. What I am most dissatisfed with in terms of my writing is my inability to effectively refer to a specific task, or bring and essay back to what a topic means as a whole.

8. I think that the part of the writing process that I will need the most help with will be just getting started.

9. If I had a choice of topics for a research project, the issues I would liek to write about would most likely relate to race and how society has viewed it over time; something of that nature.

10. When I think of the term argument I think of verbal fighting and trying to make my voice heard over another. I think that taking a course that focuses on argumentation will help me get my voice heard more frequently and in a more intelligent manner.