Hey! My name is Carmen Yohannes and I am a junior majoring in Anthro Human Bio. My family is from Eritrea, but I live in Denver Colorado. I took an English course with Instructor Tyler Tennat my freshman year and loved his teaching style. I really do enjoy reading and watching pieces and then taking time to discuss them in class. This is definitely a learning style that I flourish in because it allows me to reanalyze small details I may have missed or consider something I did not before.
Through my educational career, one thing that I underestimated the importance of is planning. Behind my best papers is an even better outline. While this may not be necessary for every piece of writing, it has really improved the quality of most of my academic papers. It is not only about what you write but how you write it. Through planning, I have noticed my storytelling through writing drastically improve.
As we have also discussed in class, I have also noticed how reading and writing go hand and hand. While I am typically most interested in self-help or non fiction books, the writing styles I have read are a source of inspiration for my own writing style. Through time I have also learned which types of books I enjoy reading, and through this class I am definitely looking forward to broadening my horizons!
Hey Carmen! I’m so excited you’re taking this class, and thank you for your post! I love that you bring up outlines and planning as a writing strategy, because that’s definitely something we’ll be talking about throughout the semester. My recommendation when it comes to outlines is essentially to let the outline be a guide or map leading you in a direction to get you started and to maintain momentum, but don’t be afraid to change and edit your outline — to make your outline work for your writing, and not to make your writing fit into an outline. Writing is a process of discovery, so we don’t always know what we mean to say until we’ve exhausted everything we could say. Outlines and planning help (they’re sometimes my best friend!), but they can sometimes trip us up when we feel like we’re not meeting a certain standard or following a plan we set before we knew what the process of writing would be like. I am also happy you mentioned that reading informs your own writing style — I like to believe we are partly the accumulation of everything we’ve read, of everything we could think to cite, and that who we choose to cite and emulate our writing after isn’t just an aesthetic decision but a political one as well.