I began my first college English class at Fresno City College. The main purpose of the class was to introduce college freshmen to the structure and mechanics of academic writing. On my first day of class, my instructor likened learning the structure of academic writing to understanding the sonata form of the symphony; there are numerous sonata form symphonies but almost all are organized into five movements: introduction, exposition, development, recapitulation, and coda/conclusion (Yuee, Hwan).
Academic writing functions in the same way. For instance, essays usually start with an introduction which includes a thesis, the body of the essay which consists of paragraphs that support the thesis and a conclusion. My first college English class helped me to understand that academic writing is a universal communication tool, reading English literature can difficult for all students and that good writing can thoroughly engage and excite its readers.
Academic writing may cover vast topics and interests but its structure is universal; this means that while some writing is often subject to different interpretations there are common elements that are understood by everyone; this concept made me less anxious about taking an English class. English is not my first language. In school, I had a harder time than most students in English classes. However, my first college English class was different. We didn’t begin the semester with a writing assignment. Instead, we read William Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Our first assignment was to write a journal entry that reflected our interpretation of the play and our experience reading Old English. This was an interesting assignment for me because for once I was on par with my English speaking peers. We all worked together to understand the old English words. My instructor chose this assignment to illustrate the universal characteristics of the written word. Although Shakespeare’s plays were written in the late 1500’s using old English, it was still structured in a way that can be understood today.
During the course of the class, we wrote several kinds of essays. My instructor taught us how to clearly express our interpretation of text based on evidence from the text itself; we read Zora Neal Hurston’s There Eyes Were Watching God to discuss the manner in which she used allegory to describe various characters. I wrote the following about Hurston’s use of allegory:
“I am a huge fan of Kipling’s Jungle Book series and it is interesting that she began the novel in this way. The Bandar Log were a group of monkeys who had no leader, no honor, were unintelligent, hateful and were therefore disregarded and ignored by most of the animals in the jungle. Hurston’s use of the Bandar log in this story helped me to feel the disdain that Janie felt for most of the people she had known all her life and made me wonder how hateful they must have been for her to compare them to the bandarlog. Throughout the first chapter, Janie’s neighbors gossip and speculate about why she has returned home. Their conversations sound much like the chatter of monkeys, further solidifying Hurston comparison of them and the bandarlog”.
The most significant assignment for me was a context assignment in which we had to pick a research topic, find peer reviewed journal articles and discuss existing research on the topic and new findings. After this assignment, I found that I really enjoyed health related topics. I wrote cultural analysis essays on healthcare disparities, race as a determiner of pain management and the effect of socioeconomic status on life expectancy and chronic illnesses. In an essay I wrote comparing hospitals today to hospitals from a century ago, I argued the following: “In the early 1900’s, America’s system for educating medical professionals was extremely flawed and this adversely affected hospitals during that time”.
In this class, I found that I had strong opinions on healthcare; it was not enough to share my opinions, but I also had to have equally compelling research to support them. Moreover, I had to use college citation styles such as MLA and APA to avoid plagiarizing the ideas of others. This class helped me determine my course of study and the occupational field that I wanted to enter after I graduated. This English class is the reason that I decided to major in nursing.
My first college English class did not make me a perfect writer; I still have difficulties in my English classes, but in this class I learned how to structure my writing assignments. Most important, I lost my fear of writing; I realized that writing is a universal communication tool that I would be using for the rest of my life, that almost all students regardless of their first language had trouble comprehending some pieces of literature, but if I kept practicing I could use my writing skills to effectively engage others.
