Subject: Memo one
In high school, I had some practice of what college writing would be like. College writing revolves more around text based evidence and exploring through the authors ideas; taking the authors ideas and really getting an understanding on what they are talking about, and why. College writing isn’t expressing what you think about the author’s ideas, but what is actually is. More of a thought process must be put into a college paper for it to get the grade a student wants. In order to reach the goals I have set for myself, I will need to learn a few techniques.
In college, the writing is more analytical. The essays written are more along the lines of showing the understanding of a reading material. This is shown by breaking a reading piece down and finding what the authors main ideas are, but that’s just the beginning. College students are expected to be able to understand not only what the author is trying to say, but why are they implying those specific ideas. Along with breaking down and finding why the author’s purpose is important, you need to be able to explain in your own words. You can’t use the author’s words. The only time you can use the author’s words is if you are quoting them in your writing and you proceed with your own word afterwards. I believe I need to learn how to think more out of the box and really grasp onto the authors meanings. Last year, I did just okay on my writing pieces because I wasn’t able to take that extra step. If I want to succeed in college, I need to be able to perform analytical thinking more efficiently.
A huge difference from high school and college writing is: opinion verses explanation. In high school, we never really focused on if what we were writing was an opinion or more of an explanation. Most of the writing done in college won’t be based on opinion. For majority of the topics, facts will need to be provided to fully answer the prompt,