What I know about plagiarism right now, is that you use somebody’s work, and you try to pass it off as your own. Their is also a thing called plagiarism, and that is when you use work you did in one class, and you try to turn the same thing in to another class. Sometimes plagiarism is on accident. When I was in high school, I had this big essay for my marketing class that i needed to write. One of the requirements was to have at least three citations throughout the essay. My teacher always had an English teacher look over the essays for grammatical errors and such, and when she looked at it, she had told my teacher that I plagiarized. This was a big deal, because it was for an Ivy Tech class, and if you plagiarized you would get a 0 on the paper and an F in the class. So, I was really concerned about this and looked it over and I came to the conclusion that I had just cited wrong. So, I went to the English teacher and asked her to explain to me why I had plagiarized. She also told me that I cited wrong, and she helped me cite it the correct way. I ended up not getting in trouble for plagiarism, but getting in trouble for plagiarism is on of the worst things you can do.

For my paper I will be writing about our Christmas traditions. People I may ask questions from are my mom, grandpa, grandma, brother, and aunt. I would want to ask them because they are people who have been practicing these traditions for as long as I can remember. Some of the information that they could give me are when our traditions started, like when we first started gathering as a family on Christmas Eve. More information would be as to why we are going to continue gathering on Christmas Eve. A thing that my family does, is that we always have the same meal, that is cooked by my grandma, and I would like to know why she started cooking this meal, and why we still have it every year, and if she plans on ever making a different meal.

I feel like this paper was a difficult one to write. Not because of the topic or anything, but just not having enough stuff to write about. It took me a long time just to think about what to write about. I ended up just putting a lot of description into stuff I usually wouldn’t do, and that was kind of the point of the assignment, so I guess I did get better.

When I did know what to write about, it came naturally. I wrote about something that was fairly recent to me, as it was my senior year in high school. So, recalling things was an easy thing to do. I know for some people in my class, they were really struggling to know what to write about because they were writing from a time that it was hard to remember what happened because it was so long ago.

It was a little fun in the sense that I could go back and write about a time that I really enjoyed. What I didn’t enjoy was sitting there trying to think what to write about. Overall, it was not a bad paper and I didn’t hate it too much.

I have been peer edited throughout high school. I do enjoy being peer edited because I feel that it makes my paper or assignment be the best that I can be. I had a friend or two in high school that read over my paper, and I read over their paper. When reading over each other’s papers, we were checking for correct grammar, making sure the flow of the paper was good, and just making sure what we wrote made sense. I feel like have someone look at my paper, benefited me by making the best writer that I could be.

I would usually have to go through and redo my paper about two or three times, and having a friend look over it for me made it easier than just doing it myself. I think having a different point of view looking at your paper will make anyone a better writer. Becoming a better writer, will result in you having better grades, and that’s all we want. Also, just improving in something, doesn’t matter what it is, gives you a sense of self pride. Being a good writer is a good skill to have, not only in school, but also in life.

Marketing was my first class of the day, and it took up half of my day. I didn’t mind because it was my favorite class. Usually when I came into marketing I would go to my desk and start drinking my chocolate milk that I brought with me about everyday. Somedays I would enjoy a donut that I had gotten from Jack’s Donuts on my way to school. Everyday when I walked in I could rely on their being a conversation going on between my friends. The class was small considering it only had six people in it, but since it was small we all got close, and we still talk to each other just about everyday. You could also rely on it smelling like pumpkin spice because of Mr. Miller’s, our teacher, wax warmer. There were a lot of great memories in that classroom, and one was right next to my desk. It was a bulletin board decoration that we made on the first day of class. It was a decoration to show what our “marketing firm” was about. We weren’t actually a marketing firm, but for all the projects we did, we pretended to be one jut to see what it was like. Marketing was a great experience, and I’ll never forget it. It really made me into the person that I am today.

My writing process really formed my senior year in high school. I was in a marketing vocational for half of the day. Not only did this course show me that this is what I wanted to study in college, it also taught me how to be a better writer. We had a variety of things to write about in this class. It wasn’t only essays, we also had to do reports and make power points.

My exposition can be talking about struggling to write in this class at the beginning of the year, and transition into me getting better writing and starting to like it. I think the moment of truth for me would be at the end of the first semester, and we had a huge essay to write. I struggled for a while because I couldn’t come up with a topic, but after awhile I finally figured it out. I would write about the business in the NBA. Once I got my topic for this assignment, I really enjoyed it. I’ve always been a big fan of sports, so being able to write about it made this assignment come easy to me. Being in this class made me realize that I really enjoyed business.

The hardest assignment I have had was in my sophomore year Spanish class. The assignment in particular was not hard, but because of the teacher it was a lot more harder than it should have been. The assignment was to write a biography about yourself. Writing the biography was the easy part, but then you had to translate it into Spanish.

It was a really difficult assignment because our Spanish teacher, Mrs. Ryan, didn’t really teach us anything. We spent our majority of the year my freshman year, watching funny cat videos on YouTube. Then my sophomore year, she really started trying to teach us, but she got really sick and was in the hospital and she missed school for about a month or two. So while she was gone, she had the substitute teacher assign us an essay. The essay was only about two pages long, but she wasn’t really looking for the content in the essay, rather if we knew how to put Spanish sentences together or not. To know ones surprise not a lot of knew how to do it. So we relied on Google Translate to get us through the assignment.  Google Translate doesn’t translate sentences correctly most of the time, so just about everyone in the class ended up with a bad grade. The grades were so bad that our teacher just ended up never putting them in the grade book.

As of right now I don’t have much of a writing process. Throughout high school I had many “filler classes.” Since I had a lot of those type of classes I had a lot of free time and I knew if I needed to write an essay I would have plenty of time to do it during the school day. I rarely took home any kind of work to work on at home I could just get it all done at school. I was in a really bad habit of not starting my essay until a couple days before it was due, and I know that is something I need to change to minimize stress and get better grades.

When I am writing a paper I usually start off by brainstorming ideas to write about. I like to get a lot ideas before I start writing. Brainstorming to me right now is just me thinking of ideas in my head, I usually don’t write any of them down I just memorize them.

When I am coming to the end of writing a paper I often reread my paper numerous times and I ask people to also proof read my paper for me too. I usually change my paper three to four times before I am happy with it and submit it to be graded.

Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton