A little of this, A little of that

I know what you're thinking, "Who's this girl, and why is she blogging now?" Well, the truth is, I have spent most of this quarter trying to think of something to blog about. I came up with a few ideas, but none seemed blog-worthy. I suppose I'm somewhat of a perfectionist.


Let me start with an introduction. I am a tutor at the University Writing Center, and a freshman at Wright State. You may be wondering how a lowly freshman can get a job at a wonderful place like the Writing Center, right? It was simple, really. As a senior in high school, I participated in a program called PSEO (Post-Secondary Education Option), which enabled me to take college classes for free, recieving high school and college credit at the same time. In this program, I took the first two English classes in the General Education Requirement along with a few others that I got to bypass here at Wright State. It was a very good experience, and I recommend it to anyone who is still in high school.



I guess now I'm supposed to talk about writing, right? One thing I found that has made me a better writer is reading. I'm a very active bookworm; I read about a book or two per week. I've found that in reading, I have greatly improved my vocabulary, as well as grammar. I have even found myself noticing grammatical mistakes in published books. Reading a lot really familiarizes you with the english language; you start to learn how to figure out the meaning of words based on their context.



For instance, you read a sentence that has a confusing word in it, so you want to find out what that word means in order to understand the sentence better. Nine times out of ten, you can look at the rest of the paragraph or even just the rest of the sentence to find the meaning of that one word. Once you have an idea of what the word means, you can replace it with a synonym and store it for future reference. If you do this often enough, with enough words, eventually it will build up your vocabulary, which will greatly improve your writing.
So there it is. A little about me, a little about writing. More to come soon.