When I first found out the topic of this course I was a little concerned. The inquiry to language did not sound all that exciting to me. I really did not know what to expect of the class. At first I thought it would be a class that would be all about writing and having to write perfect papers. Then I figured the class would talk about different languages and that excited me a little, but I have never had a class that just focused on the English language.
In just the two weeks that I have been in English 102 I have come to realize that the English language is very confusing. I do not know why anyone who is not American would want to learn such a complicated language. To me language is like a maze, because the more you think about it the more lost I get. For example, every year I try to retain all the rules for writing that I have learned over the last 12 years of school, but lately every year I find out the a least one of the rules that I learned the previous year real doesn’t exist. My senior year of high school all my English teacher ever told me was never use I in a formal paper, but in my 101 class last semester my professor told me that that rule really didn’t wasn’t important enough to keep using. Instead, she told me that as I writer I should claim my own words, cause if I did not then someone else will. Now, when I write papers all I do is say I. I probably say it too much cause in this current blog I’ve used the word I more then twenty times. Lol!
The readings that w have had to do in for class have been very interesting to me. I really enjoyed reading the first two, The Teacher, and “How language Works.” The idea that words are not things and things are not words but instead words are just ways of describing things is fascinating to me. I had never looked at language like we have done in this class and if it was not for this class I probably never would have. So to sum thing up, I love this class and I’m excited about the forth coming weeks!
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Glad you're enjoying the class! I've been looking forward to teaching this course for a few months now, and it's nice to see how it's going so far.
As far as the use of "I" in a formal paper, it's a balance, isn't it? You've got to keep in mind your audience (even in academia, there's something of a fight going on about whether one can write "I" in a serious piece of scholarship), and you've got to understand why you're writing whatever it is you're writing. I think a lot of high school English teachers see it as their job to get students away from writing "I liked this book" essays. And that's a really important job. But that doesn't mean that what was right and appropriate at one stage is necessarily the right answer for the rest of a student's writing career.
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