Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

There is a vast difference between writing at the college level and the high school level, as I have found out. There is a purpose for all of the writing in college. It means something to me. There is less focus on grammatical distractions (professors assume that you either know grammar, spelling, etc. or just don’t want to waste time re-teaching the material) and more of a focus on the actual concepts and ideas that the author is trying to convey. This is what is so important about writing. Not whether you are spelling correctly, but whether you connect to the reader and can make them understand you and sense your emotions, thoughts, and personality. This is perhaps one of the most useful tools that I have discovered so far in college. Writing in college is a vital thing to master. An author must develop a particular style for their writing. They must find their way into their audience. After all, if the audience cannot understand, relate, or at least appreciate what the author has written. What is writing without ideas? Nothing. High school writing was often just nonsense. Teachers would usually care about basic content, grammar, and length. They would rarely analyze the writing. That is the major difference between the levels of writing. College professors will analyze your work. They will often give a chance to re-write or modify your paper to make it the best it can be. They concentrate on the ideas, views, concepts, thoughts, feelings, and opinions that an author makes. I have learned to incorporate all of this into my papers, and I am still learning (and probably will be for a while!) how to modify my writing to higher levels. I realize that my writing needs plenty of work. I need to take all of the thoughts floating around my mind and put them onto paper. That is a lot easier said than done! I think that writing at the college level is a great experience that will help me in many ways throughout my life. It is important to always try and improve your writing over and over, using as many drafts a possible. “Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” (Mark Twain) It is essential to continue to develop your writing today, tomorrow, and the years to come.