Homework #5

Allen Summary
In this article Sarah Allen says that writing is not something that comes naturally to you. No matter if you are a teacher or student it takes work and lots of revisions to become a good writer. You become a better writer through practice and when you go through editing sessions to figure out what you did wrong to improve so that you can become a better writer.
Response to Allen
My response to this article is partially similar to Sarah Allen's. I use to find it hard to write papers but over the years I have gotten a little bit better. For me its all about taking the criticism you are given and try and apply that to your next paper to make it better. You will probably never write a completely perfect paper after all we are humans there will be an error here and there but after you have gone through lots of revisions I think you can write the best paper you are able to.

Murray Summary

In his article "All Writing is Autobiographical" Murray tries to explain to everyone that all writing is not autobiographical because you tie in events from your past, your dreams, your experiences and other things from your life.
GRR
I was taught to leave words like I, I believe ect. out of papers because you are making the article to personal and that it is best to make it as reader friendly as possibly and to not make it sound so personal.
WAW Questions
1.Murray is asking you to reconsider the construct of writing in first person form.
3. His article contains pieces of poetry and fiction also it contains past dreams and he uses previous stories that he has experienced to tie back into his writing. Murray says that all writing is autobiographical and that it is important to make your writing more personal than impersonal.
4. Murray's article ties in a poem which is typical in scholarly articles. He also does the same thing as other writers just not as much as others he collects work from other authors to compile it into his own work.
5. His ideas have changed the way I view writing because teachers also pounded it into our heads that we were to write less personally and more impersonally and after reading this article he proved that statement un true. Murray's writing encouraged me to write more personally again all through high school I was told to not write personally but in turn writing personally can be useful in writing a good paper too.
Meta Moments
A few things I will take from Murray is that it is okay to write personally and that you should incorporate  previous events and stories into your writing to write a better paper than you would if you just wrote it from a completely impersonal standpoint.
Murray Reflection
I found this writing interesting and very helpful because it showed me that what I was told in high school about writing wasn't completely true because you have to add some personality to your writing because not all writing is fictional.
Dawkins Summary
In this article "Teaching Punctuation as a Rhetorical Tool" Dawkins tries to explain that punctuation rules were meant to be broken. We are aware of a lot of punctuation rules but a lot of those rules were never explained well so we do not know truly how to use them.
GRR
1. My sisters tree house was made of wood scraps and cardboard, it was a great place to play with friends.
2. My sister's tree house was a great place to play with friends; it was made out of wood scraps and cardboard.
3. The tree house was made of wood scraps and cardboard, it was a great place for my sister and her friends to play.
WAW Questions
2. Handbook rules provide no instruction for the use of a comma, there are no rules for punctuating an independent clause, Punctuation is based on how much emphasis is put into punctuation.
3. The principle of raising and lowering is the higher the mark the greater the emphasis you need to place on punctuation. This impacts you choice of punctuation because based on the words you use and your punctuation is how much emphasis will be place on it and it also shows the affect it holds within the sentence.
5. That the author bases the emphasis on punctuation based on how it is used within there writings. I feel that every thing discussed in this article has for the most part already been taught to me.
6. When I am writing a paper I know that punctuation is important but I mainly focus on the content not so much the punctuation within the content. Dawkins writing has made me think a little bit more about my punctuation within my writing but I feel like I will still mainly just focus on the content but I will probably pay a little more attention to the punctuation now after reading this article.
Meat Moments
Our professor probably wanted us to read this article so we could see the emphasis that is placed on punctuation because they are probably aware of the fact that punctuation wasn't as important in high school as it should be now. After reading this article I will consider punctuation more into my writings than just plain writing the paper and going along with the traditional standard punctuation.
Dawkins Reflection
After reading Dawkins article I found the information to be very useful for my future writings but it was somewhat hard to read at times and repetitive but I think it was repetitive to in still the fact that grammar is important. In the long run I will take what I have learned from this article and bring it forward to use in my papers to come.