Fitzpatrick 1 Brandon Fitzpatrick Professor Suzanne Ingram- English 1101 Genre Study October 22, 2013 High School

Genre Throughout high school students have had various experiences with many different kinds of tests. The education system is heavily based on whether or not you are a good test taker. If you are bad at taking tests its far more difficult to get an A in core classes and get into competitive colleges. All types of standardized testing can be stressful for students but any such tests with writing portions are significantly more stressful than others. One of the most famous tests virtually every student had to take was the SAT. Unfortunately for many students since most high schools require you to take the SAT and many colleges require the SAT it is an unavoidable stress. Now the writing portion of the SAT can be difficult for various reasons. Understanding the prompt is a major difficulty for many students. You are given a paragraph of text to read and then write an essay to answer a question given to you about the text. Since the text is only a paragraph it is important to be able to carefully analyze the meaning of the text as a whole and sentence by sentence however, this must be done quickly since you only have 25 minutes to plan and write your essay. The best way to understand how to properly analyze and the prompt and write your essay is for us to analyze one. Lets start with the first sentence from a SAT given in 2009: Winning

Fitzpatrick 2 does not require people to be against someone else; people can reach their goals through cooperation just as well as they can through competition. So in this line alone what do we have to work with? Well its pretty clear that the authors purpose is to debunk the idea that to win you must beat someone else. He also wants to enforce the idea that it is possible to win by working with other people. And since this text is only a paragraph you know that this first sentence reflects the main idea of the entire text. Now everything I have just explained to you is what any student must grasp to some degree in order write a successful essay yet I have only analyzed the first sentence. Now lets continue with the second sentence: Winning is not always the result of selfish individualism. This sentence is pretty simple. It reinforces the belief that the author is trying to debunk that winning is all about one person on top. Lets move on to the third sentence: People achieve happiness by cooperating with others to increase the happiness of all, rather than by winning at others expense. Similar to the second sentence, this sentence reflects the belief that the author is trying to across to the reader. The more often a subject is repeated the more important/relevant it is to the author. Now its time to analyze the final sentence: Ours is not a world in which the price of one persons happiness is someone elses unhappiness. Naturally the author is once again reinforcing his belief (the authors name is Gilbert Brim) that winning can be accomplished through cooperation and not just competition. This time however, he puts more emotion into it. He wants you the reader to feel the same way he does. Now that we understand the text lets read the assignment. For many SAT writing assignments it simply asks a one sentence question that you are to respond to but it is also common that it will give you a bit more direction and tell you how to support your answer. The

Fitzpatrick 3 assignment we are analyzing gives that extra bit of direction and we will also analyze it sentence by sentence as well. First line: When some people win, must others lose, or are there situations in which everyone wins? This sentence is your assignment what you are trying to accomplish. Everything after this line is extra. As I stated in the last paragraph, these following sentences only serve to assist the student in putting together his/her essay. Now lets analyze the second sentence: Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. This sentence serves to clarify what you are writing about in your essay. Last line: Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations. This last sentence gives you places to look to help strengthen your argument. For example if you have competed in martial arts tournaments for a few years you are more likely to feel that to win someone else must lose. On the other hand, if you play a team sport like soccer you may be more inclined to feel that winning is about working together. The author of SAT prompts is the College Board. The prompts are intended to be viewed by the students taking the tests; however, after a few years the prompt will most likely be put online for anyone to look at. The purpose of the SAT is to determine a students readiness for college. Whats important to the author is that the students taking the test have a clear understanding of how they are supposed to answer the question and respond to the best of their ability. The advantage to the SAT is that it creates a standard that allows colleges to measure students abilities from different schools across the country and internationally. The SAT is disadvantageous to students who arent the best test takers, students who dont work well under pressure, and students who are slow writers. These students wont end up scoring high on the tests and will have trouble getting into competitive colleges. It is also the fact that not all

Fitzpatrick 4 students will go to college making the SAT an unnecessary stress for them. The prompt for the SAT itself is successful to the authors purpose; however, the SAT test in general fails to properly evaluate a students readiness for college. What separates a college ready student from your average student is how hard working they are. The majority of students that are in the top of their classes didnt have to work very hard to get As in all their classes. Because of this, many bright students flunk out their first year because they arent used to having to work hard and study for any significant amount of time. College Genre College is new. Whether it is learning a completely new subject or putting a new spin on something you know it is new. Whether it is learning to manage yourself or learning to share a room, college is new. New experiences help you grow and widen your horizon and a new experience for me was writing blog posts. For English 1101, all students must create blog posts on their personally weebly in response to questions our professor wishes us to think and respond to. The purpose of these blog posts is to make us think deeply and reflect on various assignments that we do in class so that we understand the reason behind doing the assignment and how it helps us grow as writers. Now, I have written a few blog posts before coming to college. As a matter of fact, as part of my Senior Project I created a gaming blog. So then what did I mean when I said writing blogs were new? Simply put, I had never had to write blog posts for a class in the way I do in my English 1101 class. For starters, all blog posts that I had prior experiences with, school related or not, were relatively short. Virtually all blog posts that I had experience with were a paragraph or less in length. The very first blog post that I wrote for class had in its directions to Aim for a minimum of 300 words. While typing a 300 word blog post isnt a big deal its a not

Fitzpatrick 5 what I am used to. I mentioned that my blog experiences werent longer than a paragraph. I typically define a paragraph to be 3-5 complete sentences which is around 60 words and the first paragraph of this essay contains 124 words which equates to roughly 41% of what I had to write for blog post 1. Its not difficult its different. The first blog post was divided into a few sections of questions for us to answer. The first section was to Examine the course syllabus again The first part of this section had us make inquiries which are deep, thought provoking questions about the key concepts listed in the course syllabus. In regards to this part, since I completely understood the key concepts and therefore had no questions I decided instead to define them as I understood them. For example, one of our key concepts is Responsibility for ones learning so I defined it as In college there is no one to baby you, you must keep up with your work on your own (however if you need help there are resources for you). Another part of this section had us make inquiries about the course theme which is College v.s. Highschool. Similar to the previous part, I instead gave a brief (extremely brief) explanation on the difference between college and highschool that goes as follows: College involves more critical thinking, more independence, and a division between analyzing books and writing. The second section of this assignment asked us to make inquiries about the topic of writing. As usual, I more or less defined writing rather than asked questions. My definition goes as follows: Writing is a form of expression. When you write you get out an idea, concept or outlook on a subject for the world or just yourself to think deeply about and grow from it. The third and final section asked us to write about how our first few weeks of college are going. The first 3 words of my response sum it up completely. College is new. All the

Fitzpatrick 6 responsibility of success shifts onto the student. You are responsible for whether or not you succeed or fail. The author of the blog post directions is our professor Mrs. Ingram and the author of the blog posts are the individual students who write them. The intended audience of the blog posts are students in English 1101and or professor however, since the blogs are online anyone can view them. Blog posts arent a kind of formal writing which frees the student to write in their own style using their own voice. Since the blog posts have us reflect on assignments weve done in class or are working on we get a deeper understanding of the assignment. The only disadvantage is that with the freedom to write anyway the student chooses it can be difficult to find an effective format to answer the questions. Overall this text is successful in making us think deeply about assignments weve done and better understand why we did them and how they helped us grow as writers.. Conclusion There is little that the SAT and blog posts have in common but nevertheless there is something. Both the SAT and the blog posts are geared toward students, more specifically college bound students. The SAT is used as a standard to judge whether or not a student can get into college and the blog posts are geared to give students a deeper understanding of the material we are covering in class. The SAT is formal writing while the blog posts are informal. Despite one being formal and one not they both have quite a bit of freedom when it comes to how you write them. The SAT exists for two primary reasons. The first is that colleges need some standard to judge a students ability from one versus another student from a completely different school.

Fitzpatrick 7 Two schools in the same district could have drastically different difficulty levels. The second reason is money. Whether you want to accept it or not, money makes the world go around. The SAT makes money for the College Board which is why they wouldnt get rid of it. The blog posts also exist for three primary reasons. The first is that the blog posts help us understand the material better and they help us understand the purpose behind each assignment. The second reason is that they help us remember the various assignments weve done throughout class to put on our digital portfolios. The third and final reason is that blog posts have been part of Professor Ingrams class for years now and they have been successful so far. Dont fix what isnt broken. Advice When you are writing an essay for the SAT it is important that you are able to: 1) Understand the primary message of the passage you are reading. 2) Understand how you are expected to respond (Are you taking a side or comparing and contrasting?). 3) Have a general idea as to how your paper is going to flow. As for the type of blog posts we do in English 1101: 1) Review the assignments that are being analyzed. 2) Figure out the writing style you plan on using. 3) Take the time to read over what you wrote and revise. After analyzing these two genres I have come to realize how often people take things at face value. Normally if someone asked you to analyze a blog post you would probably write a

Fitzpatrick 8 one page paper max. Learning how do think deeply about the meaning behind every sentence increases your understanding of a subject. I also learned how important it is to revise a paper more than once. I thought my paper was basically as good as it would get when we did sideshadowing but as I read through it again I found different ways to organize my paper and better wording to use. All in all, this what I took from this assignment will be very useful to me in future writing situations.