Blog Reflection

These blogs have been great for me because I have gotten to the point where I can sit down for 10 minutes and am able to put out a good amount of work. The free writing exercise has really helped me learn how to put my thoughts onto the page in a way that the reader can understand. The other exercises have helped as well such as learning to find my own voice. These blogs helped me with my writing a lot because I had to write them daily. Even though I missed a day here and there I think that overall my blogs got fluid. My blog posts started off shaky, I could not find anything to write about, but then about half-way through this course I started writing about anything that I could. It would usually be about the day that I wrote the blog post. I wish that I had remembered to do them daily because that is the way that it would have helped the most, instead of missing every few days, if I wrote everyday then my writing would probably be better than it is now. This is my reflection on these blog posts and how they have improved my writing through continuously writing.

Prewriting

Brainstorming- Places in my life
Taco Bell, Table Rock Lake, Arkansas, Oak Grove, Ci Ci's Pizza, Rolla MO, Springfield MO, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Central High School, Alaska, and Sigma Chi.

I can smell Jackie cooking breakfast in the morning. The eggs and bacon sizzling on the grill top, and the golden brown hash-browns are making this wonderful smell. There then comes a fresh scent of cut grass, because our window is usually open. These are the smells that I usually smell when I first wake up in the morning in my bed in the Sigma Chi house.
In the morning there are always a lot of different random noises that wake me up. A car will drive past our window at three o'clock in the morning and wake me up, or my roommate Grant will be snoring extremely loudly. Or someone will be taking a shower at six in the morning before their run, and that will wake me up and I will not be able to sleep.
I see all my friends, everyone will be around the house in the morning but as classes begin to start, nobody is to be found. There will always be our flag pole outside flying the US flag and the Sigma Chi flag. I see the pledges putting them up at 8 in the morning. I go downstairs and outside on the fratio, and I see our letters and the wreckage that previous night.
I feel the soft comforter on top of me. I lift my arm up and I hit the ceiling, and then I start to slowly wake up. I pick up my cellphone and check the time, its only seven, "Well, I have three more hours of sleep until I have to get up," thinking to myself. I then slowly drift back to sleep and back to my wonderful dreams.

7/16

Wednesday. The middle of the week. The day that everyone loves because Monday and Tuesday are finished. Yet the weekend is still to come. It is definitely the turning point of my week. I am always way more optimistic after Wednesday. This Wednesday is great because I finished my third calculus test and only have one more and the final is on next Wednesday. Then I will be one step closer to being done with math forever. I am really looking forward to this weekend because I get to go to my cousin's wedding and she is one of the coolest people that I know. I can't wait for the weekend, but it feels like this week is flying by. I have no idea where the days have gone and I have no idea what I'm going to do each day but I can only look forward.

7/15

This class has taught me many things that I would have never learned if I tried to teach myself. I like how the teacher incorporated group work, and discussions along with writing some big papers because that will help us when thinking of audience. What do you want your audience to know at a specific time? I have learned how to write better and more fluently. This class has been the first English class that I have taken in college. Even though I am starting my second year at missour S&T I feel like I will be ready to write papers in the near future if I need to.
This class has taught me that to be a good writer you need to find your own voice, and through this class I accomplished this. I feel that my voice as a writer is still becoming more defined. I need to take my voice an polish it to the point that people will be extremely interested in my work. This class has been a lot of writing but it was worth it.

7/14

I have a huge problem with commitment. I cannot stay committed to anything. As hard as I might try there is always something that blocks me from committing to doing pretty much everything. Usually that something is myself or my horrible time management skills. Unless the thing that I want to commit to can be completed in a few days, there is a good chance that it will not get done. There are just way too many things that I try and get done each day. Some of these things include working out, studying for calculus 3, hanging out with my friends and now reading. All of these things take up so much of my time, and along with my commitments to my family some of these things will usually not get done throughout the day.
I am taking many different steps to try and combat this "laziness" of mine. One of these steps is setting a daily alarm. I need to start bringing myself to getting up earlier and actually starting the day off strong. Another step would be to try and limit the amount of things that I want to spend on these each day. Or by splitting them up and doing a few things in Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and everything else on the other days and the weekend. These are a few steps that I am going to start incorporating in my own life to try and make it more productive.

7/13

There's nothing better than spending a weekend away from my life. I spent it in Rolla, MO where I go to school during the fall and spring semesters. I had a great time going floating down a river, all the while getting to fish and then camping. This float trip was better than the first one that I went on because I knew the people who came with me this time. There is probably no better way to spend a weekend then floating/ camping. Just getting away from everything, all my problems and my school work. I needed this because I am spending way too much time doing homework and I had to take a break from it all.  I let myself get overwhelmed with everything at times and sometimes I just need to take a step back, take a deep breath and look at my life in a way that makes it easier to organize. I love that I can do this because I will look at my life, determine what I need to do first and then take it step by step. Sometimes though I just need to stop thinking so much about mu life and just ride it out. I have plenty of ways to work with stress and they all help me to the point where I am continuously without it. It is very nice and it helps me get through life easier.

7/11

Fight Club - Maybe the greatest movie ever made? It was just a total mindfuck! I loved every second of it and when it got to the end it blew my mind. Spoiler alert. Tyler durden is the main character. I don't know how the writer created this masterpiece but it was amazing. It is probably one of my top 5 along with shutter island, shawshank redemption, Enders game, and Forrest Gump.

7/9

With only two weeks left to go of school left, it feels like summer has gone by pretty quickly. I wish that I had more time, but time tends to keep moving even if you stop. Time is almost more valuable then money. If we had more time then people could do everything they wanted rather than picking and choosing what they do with their time. If Albert Einstein had more time he could bring the world into even greater advances in physics and mathematics. There were so many things that he left unfinished because he ran out of time. There are people that want to try and accomplish everything that they can within a short amount of time and end up not doing any of it. I am a procrastinator and if there is even a slight chance that I can push something off then I will take it. Time is very important to me and I feel like spending all that I can doing what I enjoy because this life is too short to live for other people. If I was given more time on the Earth, I would probably spend it reading a book that one of my friends suggested to me.
Reading is a great way to pass the time because I will lose myself in a book and hours will go by before I take the time to put down a book. If I had more time then I would try to read all of the books that have been recommended to me.

7/8

Internet went down. I am currently writing this on my phone and it is pretty easy to write. I'm just hoping it does nott die on me.  There's way less time to think about what you want to write. It's like texting almost. In the sense where you want to write something for the audience and in that makes it easier to write. I think that I understand more about audience now. I know that to be able to write for a specific audience you need to change the way that you use words and how big of words you use.  Audience is what you want it to be. You decide if you are going to write your paper for someone who is a child or for a crotchety old man. Taking audience into consideration is very important because it determines how many people will enjoy reading what you wrote. This is what I think about audience.

7/6

       Today I got to read my writing group's essays and I have to say that I was also impressed with everyone's writing. All of the essays had something unique about them, their own voice so to say. Each essay was well written, and each one was thought provoking and relatable in some way. During this assignment, I learned many things about my own voice and how I can improve on it and make it more defined. I liked this assignment because it was easy for me to write, because I can talk about myself all day.   Throughout writing this paper, I found myself enjoying writing this essay, which has been the first time in a long time.
      One of the assignments that we had to do focused on a course called Writer's Workshop which allowed me to learn about many new writing techniques. I did not get to use them in my first draft of this essay, but I will use them in any writing that I do. I liked that assignment because it showed me how much more there is to writing then putting your thoughts on paper, that you have to write it to where other people can enjoy reading it. I thought that this course would be tedious but later found myself rereading passages just to understand them that much better. I am hoping that the rest of the month will be filled with assignments like these, and that I will continue to become a better writer.

7/3

                        Pasta
             Marinara   Bucatini
        Delicious   Saucy    Flavorful
     Tasty  Tender  Seasoning  Filling
                      Spaghetti

7/2

Today was a new day for me. I am so used to the same routine, the same people. I decided that I needed to do something for me that would be fun and productive. I just recently started to go with some of my friends to play pick up games of Ultimate Frisbee with students from MSU. The reason that I find Ultimate Frisbee fun is because I played a lot of soccer in high school and gained a massive stamina from that. I can keep up with everyone else, and I just started not too long ago. Ultimate Frisbee is a lot like soccer in many different ways. In both you do not watch the disk/ ball, you look at the throwers/ kickers eyes to determine where they are going to play it off to. Over the years, I have gotten pretty good at seeing where the person throwing/ kicking the object. It is the same in real life; you have to understand where a person is coming from before you can see where they are going to go. 

Sports have had a big influence in my life, and from them I get to meet a lot of different, interesting people. Everyone that I have met through the sports that I have played have all tried their hardest, and they had a strong will to win. They lay everything on the line for those 90 + minutes, and they give their all to win. Then after the game whether they win or lose, they act like good sports. There is the occasional player who gets super mad when they lose, but they eventually get over it. Sports have always played a huge part in who I am, because I pretty much taught myself that I can accomplish anything if I devote time to learning how to do it over and over. This can be said through everything in my life, such as school work or through trying to learn about an interesting new computer part. I will try to make my brain learn it because I know that if I go without learning something when I had the chance to I would really regret it. This is how sports have influenced my life.

7/1

Today is the first day of July. I had my second Calculus III test today, and I thought that I did very well. I am also starting my This I believe essay, which is going better then expected. This is the longest essay that we have had to write in this class by far. I am definitely going to use the techniques that I have been learning about, such as writing a bad first draft, and then going from there and making the paper something that will blossom greatly. The other techniques that I have learned about are freewriting which is what I am doing with these blogs. I am giving myself about 10 minutes to write these and I am getting about three hundred words every time.
I am thoroughly enjoying this class because it is making seem like writing is fun and not just busy work. I can get what I want to get on the page and then it is out of my mind, it is pretty much just jotting down my thoughts onto the paper. Writing is not much harder then thinking and when I do not think of writing as writing, and I just think about it as thinking, it makes it much easier to write. I enjoy thinking and I spend a lot of my day just closing my eyes and thinking about the problems that I have to deal with and I come up with some great answers to my problems. I think that to be able to think through my problems is a great thing to have. I believe that without thinking you can get nothing done, because even to be spontaneous you have to think about time- management.
This class has been very fun, but I also like that there is only a few weeks left of school because I can finally get back to Rolla and see all of my friends. This summer has been extremely busy for me as well, but I am having fun.

6/30

I just checked blackboard for the assignments and it seems like this will be a week full of writing. I am not too worried about all the assignments because I know that I have what it takes to write. Anyone can write well if they are able to put words into a sentence that makes sense. This week we have to write a three to four page paper that is due on Thursday which I need to start. I also need to start writing more blog posts, but it is hard for me to think of things to write about for these. I feel that if I write more and more, it will become easier to write blog posts because I will not need to think as much. There is a lot going on in my mind now and it is not easy for me to just power through these. I want to take a break and it throws me off of the paper because all I can think about is going outside and playing some type of sport. I feel as if I have no time to do this in college because I am always busy. I have no time for myself anymore and it is hard to stay focused on anything. The things that I enjoy are running, hiking, and playing sports like ultimate frisbee, frisbee golf, soccer and tennis. These sports got me through high school because I had a ton of free time. Now it seems like I am constantly doing homework or something school related. I want school to be over, but at the same time, I know I will have even less time when I am out in the work force to be doing these kinds of things. I guess that I am done with my rant and it is time to start studying for my Calc III test.

Know Your Audience

     The Know Your Audience discussion has been my favorite discussion so far. I got to answer a lot of questions that were thought provokers. There were also a lot of different answers from my classmates. This shows that our class is very diverse. There are many different types of people in the class, from students that have just graduated high school to people who are older and already have children and are already married. The only thing that most of us have in common is that we are taking this class. I like it this way because it is fun to read the answers of some of the questions where I would answer one way and other people could take the answer a completely different way.
     The question that I found the most intriguing was "Why do you feel college is important?" This was answered very differently by everyone in the class. Everyone agreed that college is important, but the reasons that it was important to them were very different. A lot of the answers are about the future, whether that is finding a job, or just completing a goal.
     Through this question I learned a lot about audience, and I learned that while there are differing views about each subject, the audience still wants to hear opinions that are not their own. In that way it is easy to try and direct the writing to a specific group of people, because you know what they want to hear. That is not the audience that I want to be writing to. I want to write for myself, but I understand that audience is important. Being in this class has helped me understand that while people think differently, they are still the audience and the writing should be for them. This will not change my writing all that much because I find that I try and write for whoever my audience is.

My Credo

I believe in wisdom, because without wisdom, nothing would get accomplished. Wisdom is one of the most important traits and I believe that everyone has wisdom, but some people choose not to use their wisdom. Wise people are well respected in their fields/ communities. Someone who is wise should be able to see the answers and how to effectively finish something. I believe that it is important to be wise, not just because a wise person can see answers, but because they have most likely been through many of the struggles that other people are going through and can give them advice. Wisdom may in fact be the most important trait. Without wise people, there would not have been any movements, and we would make the same mistakes that we made hundreds of years ago. Wise people have brought the world forward and they have created everything that we have today. I consider myself to be wise, because I try to learn everything that I can in most situations. Wisdom is not only for the smartest of people but it is available to everyone. Wise people have seen that keeping knowledge to themselves have only ended in despair. Wisdom, while available to the general public, is not always utilized by everyone. People still make the same mistakes that other people have and end up learning the exact same lesson, it would be like taking a longer route to get to the same place. That is why I think that wisdom is important, it is easy to find an answer to a problem, but there are times when you have to work it out for yourself and in that find your own wisdom.

Freewriting

I believe that every question has an answer, even if that answer may not be the one that is the most obvious. The most obvious answers seem like they should be the right one, and most of the time it is, but there are cases where the most obvious answer is the one that you should avoid. The most obvious answer could be one that makes the most sense. I think that answers should be sought out and found the hard way, and that is by fact checking anything that you do. If two sources say the same thing then it would be easier to believe that answer, but if they say completely opposite things or focuses on different things then the answer is harder to find. There would need to be more sources that need to be checked and to do this takes time. Time is one of the hardest things to aquire because once you go forward in time, there is no redoing anything. Exactly liek this assignment. I have already messed up spelling some words, and that irks me to no other, but i will get over it. This is a lot easier then I originally thought itwould be and now I think that I will have to practice writing like this more often. The answer to getting better at something is practice. I have always dedicated myslef to learn how to do different things and I hate giving up. It makes my stomach feel horrible, and I hate that feeling. Giving up sucks, but if you persevere long enough to see yourself become better then it is all worth it. This 10 minutes is really long, but I still need to take up another 2 minutes. There is not much more that I can say on the every question has an answer, but I can give examples. A hard question would be "What is the meaning of life?" but people that are a lot smarter than me have tried answering it, but my answer would be whatever you make of your life gives it meaning. The answer does not always have to be corrct in societies eyes but if you find out that the answer is correct to you then it is.

This I believe...

I believe that I have the ability to be whoever I want.
I believe I am smart.
I believe that my friends are awesome.
I believe in science.
I believe that every question has an answer.
I believe that I am hungry.
I believe that the future will be fun.
I believe I make my own decisions.
I believe in myself.
I believe that people should ask more questions.
I believe in what I love.
I believe that people deserve second chances.
I believe in respect.
I believe in the truth.
I believe that football is the greatest sport ever.
I believe in fighting for what you believe in.
I believe in seeing the best in other people.
I believe that I will find a wife one day.
I believe Leonardo DiCaprio is a great actor.
I believe that having fun is the best stress reliever.
I believe that my 10 minutes are up.

Jung Typology Test Results

The result that I received was ESTP, which stands for Extrovert, Sensing, Thinking, and Perceiving. http://www.humanmetrics.com/hr/JTypesResult.aspx. This expresses who I am pretty well, not only as a person, but a writer as well. While reading the indicators page, I felt that it described me perfectly. I am a flaky person, that schedules things without thinking, and then I am constantly trying to make it better, in some detailed way. It usually pans out how I want it to. According to the indicator page, I am a self-centered person that is easily motivated, but can lose motivation easily when things become hard. In writing this means that I can start off a paper pretty easily, but about halfway through or even further along in the paper, I will lose interest because I am barely thinking about what I am going to write next. I think that this has shown me how I write, and how I can use this to my advantage when I am writing. Something I can work on is getting things started earlier. I usually put things off as long as I can, and this will sometimes hurt when I am writing because it will be harder to finish before the date that it is due. I can see this now and it will help in the future.
-Micah

Test

Test Post
Not sure how this would look. So I am doing this as a test post.