Chapters 1-3 (The McGraw-Hill Guide)

My first blog entry is to discuss the first assigned reading for my Composition class. The reading covered the first three chapters of The McGraw-Hill Guide. I found this reading to be very helpful. I think that if anyone feels that they are not a strong writer, referring back to these first three chapters could help them out greatly.

Chapter One first discussed the four areas of life where writing skills are necessary. These four areas are Academic, Professional, Personal, and Civic. Then after explaining how we use writing in each of these areas, the goals for the course were discussed. The four broad goals are Rhetorical Knowledge, Critical Thinking, Reading and Writing, Composing Processes, and Knowledge of Conventions.

Chapter Two consisted of strategies to use to be a critical reader. These strategies included but were not limited to skimming, annotating and summarizing. A writer's journal was mentioned, and I had never heard of a writer's journal. I think that this could be very helpful because the journal would include summaries of what had been read. These strategies seem very effective for understanding any reading, no matter the subject.

The final chapter of the final reading, Chapter Three, covered important and effective ways to discover and develop ideas for writing. The invention strategies for writing are listing, freewriting, questioning, answering the questions who? what? where? when? why? and how?, brainstorming, and clustering. I really like the idea of a dialectical notebook and a vocabulary notebook, they seem like they would be very helpful. Also I liked the section that discussed rewriting your class notes. I have hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes, and I feel that if I had taken the time to rewrite them as mentioned in the guide, that I would have absorbed the knowledge much better.