Welcome to the introduction to Reading Response 3. Hopefully the title caught your attention and you decided to read what I had to say. According to Chapter 8 – Organization and Drafting, there should be an introduction to your paper. I’ll be talking about what the chapter had to say about formatting your paper as well as experiences I have encountered in my day to day life. For now, sit back and enjoy the words that I am typing.
From the reading we see that we should break up our papers based on three things, introduction, body, and conclusion. Even though that seems like common sense (the author even says so), some people do not seem to be bothered with that structure. It really surprised me when I asked fellow students how they opened their papers and they said they did not do an introduction, nor did they plan on it. Now what was really surprising was the teachers did not mark off for such a basic English paper requirement that we all grew up with.
The chapter then went on to explain how to write for other cultures. I found this section interesting as it once again showed to know your audience and how to write to them. I am sure it will come in handy if I ever need to write a letter to an international business partner.
One thing I agree with is the box that talked about Timothy Myers and how he wrote his introductions to his paper last. I usually do that as it is much easier to summarize where you are going with your paper at the end rather than at the beginning. Why confine yourself into a box when you are writing.
Since the chapter did not go into much detail about power points, I decided I would share with all of you this YouTube Video. Don McMillan, a stand-up comedian, tells you what not to do during when making a power point. I found it very funny as I am sure we have all experienced one of these types of power points at some time in our academic career.
As a side note, our resumes our due next week and I found this article that informs us of Six Words That Make Your Resume Suck.. I figured I would share it with all of you in hopes that it would help one of you get that internship or job you wanted.
Reason for no structure?
I have found it amazing that while so many people understand the importance of a proper introduction, they still choose not to craft a proper one. Without proper attention to the creation of an introduction, a writer is almost guaranteed a quick loss of the audience’s attention. (If your audience is quickly losing it’s interest, why write a document?) I can only assume that this decision is caused by pure laziness. While writing, I have found that I might initially write a weak introduction but upon writing my body, I have found it very easy to write an effective introduction.