Model Senate
This is the model senate project, we wrote bills about climate change, immigration, and college debt. We modeled what senate looks like, we made committes for each bill and debated them, amended them, and voted on them. Everybody was assigned to a senator, and had to learn about their senator and act upon the bills as if they were their senator.
My bill
Writing goals
One thing that I want to improve by the end of the year is my word choice. I tend to pick poor words for places where I could use stronger, more descriptive words. For example where I say walk when instead I could say something like trotted or waddled. I struggle with this because I don’t have a very large vocabulary. A good example from my college essay is where I wrote “While I sit behind my camera...” Instead of saying sit, I could say something like squat or kneel. Usually I will look up synonyms for words and use one of those. I want to be able to come up with these synonyms on my own without the help of Google. I’m not really sure how I could develop this skill, I think it would be just through working and writing a bunch because the more I do it the better I will get at it.
Another thing that I think I need to work on is sentence flow. I will first write a bunch of random stuff, which typically is spelled wrong, grammatically incorrect, and just has no flow. When this happens I am usually okay with it because I will delete things and change everything around but it still doesn’t seem to flow properly. My brain doesn’t seem to understand how to create the proper flow right away. After a while I am able to make things flow somewhat well but like I said, it takes a while. I would like to be able to create flow easily, I want my writing to be able to go onto paper and make sense just as if I was talking. A good example of this would be from my seminar reflection when I try to talk about how cynicism can be beneficial. I did not do a good job of talking about this at all. Lori was unsure of what my argument was because I did a poor job phrasing things and explaining. I think that this skill will improve over time. I am not a strong writer at all, but I think that I will slowly get better at it as the year goes on.
I need to work on structuring in my paragraphs. I tend to ramble on and it just gets really chaotic. Everything is jumbled up and it is not good. I need to make my paragraphs in TEA form. An example is on my seminar reflection, I talked about the question that I had picked but I was a little all over the place in my writing. I need to focus on using TEA paragraph form. I know that this makes my writing harder to read and understand when it is not in TEA. I think that this will improve with me spending more time focusing specifically on writing in TEA form and not so much on just writing to get words on the paper. Over time I will get better at structuring my writing.
While I was working on my college essay, at first I did not make it personal at at. I didn’t talk about myself, which I knew is a key part of a college essay. So scraped a lot of what I had and wrote about myself, which ended up working, but I wanted to change it again and make it into a story. So again, I scraped pretty much everything and wrote a story about filming, I used that as my first paragraph and then answered the prompt more formally in the second paragraph. I went through a lot of problems like trying to figure out how to phrase things, how to arrange my sentences, grammar and word choice. A good example is when I wrote “Cameras are my escape from reality while I am still in it.” Now this was from one of my very first drafts, and when I got to the essay I have now I reworded it in a completely different way. I basically changed it and talked about how I get butterflies in my stomach and I get super happy when I’m filming. In my final draft I wrote “All of these thoughts are cluttering my mind. When I see the thumbs up my mind goes blank with excitement. I just wait and watch. As the bike speeds past me, I get this weird feeling in my stomach. This feeling as if I have butterflies in there. I grab my camera and scurry down the trail with the biggest smile on my face, “Look at this!” As I show my friend the video, I feel amazing. Almost as if I had an adrenaline rush from capturing something so breathtaking.” It is different but I feel that it relates to being in my own little world in some way. When I was in peer critique I was told to tell a story in my essay. Reading a story is more interesting than just reading a bunch of statements. So I changed my essay to tell a story about my points, I made it so you could understand the statements from reading my story. I just kind of spent time writing stories about myself and pick one that I liked. It took some time but it worked out.
Another thing that I think I need to work on is sentence flow. I will first write a bunch of random stuff, which typically is spelled wrong, grammatically incorrect, and just has no flow. When this happens I am usually okay with it because I will delete things and change everything around but it still doesn’t seem to flow properly. My brain doesn’t seem to understand how to create the proper flow right away. After a while I am able to make things flow somewhat well but like I said, it takes a while. I would like to be able to create flow easily, I want my writing to be able to go onto paper and make sense just as if I was talking. A good example of this would be from my seminar reflection when I try to talk about how cynicism can be beneficial. I did not do a good job of talking about this at all. Lori was unsure of what my argument was because I did a poor job phrasing things and explaining. I think that this skill will improve over time. I am not a strong writer at all, but I think that I will slowly get better at it as the year goes on.
I need to work on structuring in my paragraphs. I tend to ramble on and it just gets really chaotic. Everything is jumbled up and it is not good. I need to make my paragraphs in TEA form. An example is on my seminar reflection, I talked about the question that I had picked but I was a little all over the place in my writing. I need to focus on using TEA paragraph form. I know that this makes my writing harder to read and understand when it is not in TEA. I think that this will improve with me spending more time focusing specifically on writing in TEA form and not so much on just writing to get words on the paper. Over time I will get better at structuring my writing.
While I was working on my college essay, at first I did not make it personal at at. I didn’t talk about myself, which I knew is a key part of a college essay. So scraped a lot of what I had and wrote about myself, which ended up working, but I wanted to change it again and make it into a story. So again, I scraped pretty much everything and wrote a story about filming, I used that as my first paragraph and then answered the prompt more formally in the second paragraph. I went through a lot of problems like trying to figure out how to phrase things, how to arrange my sentences, grammar and word choice. A good example is when I wrote “Cameras are my escape from reality while I am still in it.” Now this was from one of my very first drafts, and when I got to the essay I have now I reworded it in a completely different way. I basically changed it and talked about how I get butterflies in my stomach and I get super happy when I’m filming. In my final draft I wrote “All of these thoughts are cluttering my mind. When I see the thumbs up my mind goes blank with excitement. I just wait and watch. As the bike speeds past me, I get this weird feeling in my stomach. This feeling as if I have butterflies in there. I grab my camera and scurry down the trail with the biggest smile on my face, “Look at this!” As I show my friend the video, I feel amazing. Almost as if I had an adrenaline rush from capturing something so breathtaking.” It is different but I feel that it relates to being in my own little world in some way. When I was in peer critique I was told to tell a story in my essay. Reading a story is more interesting than just reading a bunch of statements. So I changed my essay to tell a story about my points, I made it so you could understand the statements from reading my story. I just kind of spent time writing stories about myself and pick one that I liked. It took some time but it worked out.