Mason's Reading and Writing Outside of Class

When I am reading or writing something outside of class I find myself trying to figure out what is wrong with a peice of writing. When I am writing outside of class I find myself trying to write with the fewest amount of words to get the same point across. When writing, I have to find more information because my sentences are short and sweet. The way I try to fix sentences makes me understand the sentences and the general point more.

Erin's Reading And Writing Outside Of Class

I do not usually read and write outside of class but I have noticed myself reading magazine articles and seeing that "be" verbs and prepositions stick out more ever since we have learned the Paramedic Method. I was in Mr. Lee's class one day and we were reading through the text book. I told him there was a sentence that was not well written because it had 4 prepositions in it. He laughed at me and said "Since when do you care about that?" He better watch out now, I'm going to pick out every preposition and "be" verb I can find thanks to the Paramedic Method.

Mason's Lesson's Learned

Recently we have been learning how to use the paramedic method. It is a revising process that you eliminate the unnecessary material. Sentences can be shorter and say the exact same thing and all the same information. The fisrt step is to get rid of the prepostitions. The second step is to throw out the be verbs. The third step is to get rid of slow wind up and get straight to the point. This type of revision makes the paper shorter, but it makes the paper more full of imformation in a less amount of words.

Erin's Things Read

We have read few articles this nine weeks but we watch a movie called "John Smith." I liked this movie because it showed how different peoples lives can be. The only thing these seven people had in common were their names. The movie taught me that a person can never understand what someone else is going through. Everyone is different in their own way...even if they have the same names.

Erin's Lessons Learned

We have recently learned a new and very helpful way to revise our papers. It is called the Paramedic Method. There are basically three steps to this method. The first step is to circle all of your prepositions. Once you have finished that, you have to put a box around your "be" verbs. Then, eliminate your slow wind-ups. If you do these steps, your paper will be much clearer for the reader to comprehend. My paper sounded ten times better after following these steps.

Mason's Things Read

In class, we really haven't read anything in class but we watched a movie. The movie was about a group of people with the same exact name. This movie, I think, that it was trying to explain the difference of the lifestyles in America. John Smith is the most popular name in America, but when looking closer in the lives of the people the results are in a wide variety.

Tyler- Reading and Writing Outside of Class

My role as a reader or writer outside of the class room is to basically become a teacher. What I mean by this is whenever you read something or write something, go over it one or two more times and see what you can find wrong with the paper. In addition to doing this, you can also "grade" it like a teacher would. Find out what is wrong with the essay/paper and write down the cons about it. On the contrary, also write down the pros to it because it can possibly advance you as a writer.

One day I was in Mr. Lee's room during break. He had an article up on his computer about Georgia Tech football. He called me over to read it because he thought there were some interesting facts mentioned in the article. After reading it, I thought it was one of the worst articles I have ever read in my life. It had run-on sentences, lists of prepositions, and some ideas were not completely clear. It was a good article in the area of information, but in the area of grammar, it was awful. After reading the article, I noticed that i could write the article in such a better way than the author could. I read though it again, making changes in my head and asking myself, "How could I make this paragraph have better transitions?" Before i knew it, I was trying to rewrite the article but I had to stop myself because I was becoming a little Mr. Goergen.

Tyler- Things Read

This second nine weeks, we have not really read anything in class, but we did watch a movie over the paramedic method. I honestly liked the movie because it gave me a way to look at something in a way I have never before. It made me think as an outside reader or someone else who is reading your paper. It made me realize that mostly everyone tends to add unnecessary padding to sentences. One lesson I learned from the video was to never use "be" verb forms if possible. It does not show complete action of a sentence uses a "be" verb. Another lesson I learned is to try and avoid using multiple prepositional phrases in a row. When a writer does this, it sounds like the writer is making a list and it just seems to last forever. Also, do not confuse your reader. Make paragraphs more clear and concise because it makes for a better read.

Tyler-Lessons learned

I really liked learning the paramedic method. It is something I have never even heard of before and I believe that I can use this method to my advantage in the future. Even though converting my whole paper from one form to another was difficult, I know that it made my paper a much easier read. It makes things more clear to the reader and it also allows the writer to read his/her paper carefully and it allows them to actually understand each paragraph. To use the paramedic method, you have to : 1. Circle the prepositions 2. Draw a box around "is" verb forms 3. Ask, Wheres the action? 4. Change the action into a simple verb 5. Who's kicking whom? 6. Eliminate slow wind ups 7. Eliminate redundancies

Things Read..

The most interesting thing to me that we read in the past couple of weeks would be the article "Crazy Things Seem Normal, Normal Things Seem Crazy". This article stuck out to me because it was different from all of the other articles that we have read in the past. The author, Chuck Klosterman, makes it interesting by describing every detail fro m his journey to interview Val Kilmer. He describes how strange Kilmer is which lets the readers know his definition of normal is weird to us. I thought the way the article was written was very descriptive and specific which made it much more interesting to read.

Reading/Writing Outside of Class.

I have never been one to read or write outside of class, but I have found myself reading more magazine articles and sometimes the sports column in the newspaper. I am also not a big fan of writing but I have grown to enjoy writing papers that I can somewhat relate too. The past three papers that we have written so far this semester have actually been very interesting to write but I still don't ever take the time to write anything outside of class. I hope that someday I will learn to appreciate writing and maybe start writing something of my own.

Lessons Learned.

This nine weeks we learned a new revision technique. It is called the Paramedic Method. This method contains many steps. The 1st step is to read through the paper and circle all of the prepositions. The second step is to draw a box around any "be verbs or linking verbs. Third, you have to find where the action is being done and then change the action into a simple verb. Fourth, the person doing the action should be moved into the subject of the sentence and then eliminate any other slow wind-ups. Lastly, eliminate all the other unnecessary parts. After completing all of these steps, divide the new word count of each sentence by their old word counts and subtract from 1. This determines each sentence's "Lard factor" and you will be able check to see how well you revised your sentence.

On Composition

The peer review group influenced our papers tremendously. It helped each peer review member improve their paper by providing each member with little tidbits of information that helped with the overall structure of the paper. It allowed for the papers to become easier to read in certain spots and it helped the flow of the paper become better. We thought that eliminating "be" verbs and most prepositional phrases was tough but on the contrary, it helped the readability of our papers. Because we had to get rid of these items, Mason took out information that did not make since. When he had a lot of be verbs and prep. phrases, the sentences seemed to bond to each other but when they were eliminated, it became just information that was irrelevant. When we were studying Erin's and Peyton's paper, we realized something was wrong in the first paragraph. We decided that those paragraphs lacked information so we had to come up with things to help get the point across early in the paper. Tyler's paper was somewhat the same as most of these papers but he had a body paragraph that needed some work after eliminating "be" verbs.