"Designed" Text

Today's reading was from the Norton's Field Guide to Writing with Readings pages 453-484. The reading covered print text, spoken text, and electronic text. This was a very good reading for this week because it relates to the upcoming project that we will be doing which is either making a commercial or making a website. It helps us know how to "design" the text or spoken words so that people will be attracted to read or listen to what you have to say. This is a very important part of both making a commercial and making a website. Also it tells us how to use visuals along with the text or spoken words so that people better understand the message.

In spoken text we must structure our words very well so people understand better and we must speak clearly. The part about speaking clearly is very important because if you don't speak clearly then you could be misunderstood or tuned out because you are not pronouncing your words clearly. This could be a huge turn off for your audience.

Overall, this reading contributed a lot to the knowledge of how to write and speak professionally. It will also help me in our project that is coming up so that we can write effectively for the audience.

Begin with the End in Mind

Today's reading was from Chapters 28 and 29 in The Norton Field Guide to Writing With Readings pages 239-249, 250-254. The reading talked about how we could write our beginning and ending paragraphs and how to clarify to our readers what we are trying to say in our writings and how to transition smoothly between paragraphs.

I honestly did not know that there are so many ways to write a beginning and a ending paragraph! I always knew that you needed to attract the reader and give some background info but I did not know you could define key terms or start with a story. All of this provided me with good information about how to start off a successful beginning paragraph.

The second part of the reading was about end paragraphs. Who knew that you could actually have two end paragraphs! One to summarize the subject and the other to give your own opinion on the topic.

The last part of the reading was about transition sentences, thesis sentence, and topic sentences. This gave me a lot of insight on how I need to be specific with what the topic is so that the reader is not left guessing what I am trying to say. Also the thesis sentence is one of the most important parts of the writing because without it the reader would not know what the objective of the story or essay is.

Helping organize our Writings

Today's reading was about causes and effects, classifying and dividing, and comparing and contrasting. The readings were meant to help us with our writing that we are working on this week. It helps us organize our writing so that we concentrate on one thing at a time. The causes and effects section talked about how we are not to be sure that a cause is a direct effect of something but instead we should think that it may be a reason for the effect. The classifying and dividing section talked about how we need to specify the class of whatever we are analyzing and not to leave it at a broad class. The comparing and contrasting section told us how we can use visuals and text together to analyze things and how they go together.