Personal Narrative: My English Language And Composition Class

In my high school career, I have taken advanced English courses. The most notable class I took was AP English Language and Composition my junior year. This is where I got a taste of what college composition and drafting research arguments were like. A challenge I faced when writing researched arguments in high school was finding reputable sources to support my claims.

When I took your class here at SLU, I had another chance to face this challenge again. Taking an actual college composition course was a completely different experience than taking Advanced Placement courses in high school. Instead of emphasizing different rhetorical strategies and logical fallacies such as red herring, anaphora, and rhetorical questions like I did in high school,

Our first assignment was using our experiences and papers and synthesizing them to develop three arguments to research and advocate for. Although I wrote a paper on artificial intelligence, I decided to stick with funding for science education for low-income public schools, since it blended my inner science nerd with a calling for improving society.

The first sub-challenge was when I wrote the topic proposal. Knowing my goals and interests in mind, writing it was relatively easy. However, despite my laid-out plans, peer review is what really motivated me to think about my topic. Kylie Hess harshly criticized my review by saying she didn’t know what I was advocating for, while Julia Manoogian didn’t say much other than that my topic “makes sense.” Given these conflicting reviews, I revised some of my statements to the best of my ability and submitted my first college English

While attempting to complete the Dissoi Logoi assignments, there were few articles written on opposing educational funding other than biased right-wing media outlets. After discussing my predicament with you, I decided to switch to arguing for and against the Common Core, since it had an impact on education in a more direct way than finances. The peer reviews I were given were more helpful, fortunately. Julie Waters liked my passion, while Lauren Foster and Riley Bowling praised my use of sources and organization. With Common Core, there were reputable sources on both sides, so research was relatively easy, even though there was a small challenge in finding the right sources that I want to use for my paper.

During the researched argument, I tried to use Common Core again, but Tyler Greer suggested that I should try to find an original solution. That’s when I learned about the hybrid educational system, which advocated for blending traditional classroom experiences and flexibility, along with maintaining some Common Core aspects. There are is a small population advocating for its efficiency and effectiveness, and I feel that advocating it will benefit millions of high school students in the United