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Sarah Ann's picture

And Now For Something Completely Different.

Bonus if you get the Monty Python reference! Moving on...

Oddly enough, the one thing that struck me the most about our class discussion from Thursday had little to nothing to do with the creation of the universe. Part of the point of this course is to teach us how to write, so I feel this is relevant enough to merit a posting. At the beginning of class, we were talking about our papers and our writing styles, and how different the style of our next paper would be. Anne mentioned that here, unlike high school, we were allowed to speak from our own points of view as the voice in our papers. I don't know about anyone else, but in my high school, a paper was considered inappropriate and irrelevant if we used "I" or "my" in any sort of writing. We were taught how to write so we could pass standardized testing, really, and apparently expressing personal opinions is wrong. We lost points, sometimes even full credit for the paper if we wrote as "I" rather than an objective outsider. It struck me on Thursday, and I've been thinking about that since. What was the purpose behind that? Did high schools not want us to learn how to take responsibility for our own thoughts and words? I know, that's a rather over-dramatic and pessimistic viewpoint, but still.

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