How Is College English Different

Alejandro Ledezma
English 5A
9-6-13
How is college English different? When we are in high school we are taught simple reading and writing skills. At most the teachers there just introduce us to those skills. We aren’t given much exposure to these skills during the school year. The skills taught to us are the basics and it’s not until we reach college that students see the difference in what is being taught. The things that were taught to me about reading and writing in high school were simply the basic skills. Such as being taught in the ninth grade to highlight important information and take notes on my readings so when I would begin the writing process I could find the information faster. Then being taught throughout my high school
If I didn’t intrigue the reader then my writing wasn’t good enough and in those sentences it was required that I had to try and use more sophisticated vocabulary so that the reader won’t get bored of me repeating words. Then in my junior year I was taught how to annotate articles. My teacher said that the reason that we annotate was to put notes near parts of the article that we either found important or that we wanted to go back to for more clarification. I had also been taught the simple skill of rereading where if it didn’t make sense the first time go back and read the article all over again so I can try to understand it. Rough drafts were something that had been required since I was learning how to write paragraph papers. We would have to peer edit another student’s writing and see if we can find any errors however my experiences with this was that my friends would peer edit my writing in the class and wouldn’t be honest with my writing and say that it was good even though there may have been mistakes they could’ve told me about while they were editing. My high school English teachers had
In high school we are introduced to these skills to analyze text and write well-organized papers. However we are just given a brief introduction to those skills in high school. In college English we retrace our steps and go back to those skills taught to us so that we can practice these skills and learn to master them to benefit us in the future. The reason it benefits us is because it strengthens our reading and writing skills by practice. In college we will learn more skills for difficult readings so we can use these skills to find the main points in articles for a deeper understanding. The skills we learned from high school hasn’t really taught us how to use them in today’s world, whereas in college we will learn how to enter in academic conversations and put in our opinion about the topic and also learn how to accept other people’s point-of-view by keeping an open mind. Since we will be reading higher level readings in college English then in high school English we will be able to enhance our vocabulary skills by looking up words that are unknown to us and will be able to use later on in any of our future writings. Compared to high school, college English will teach us more ways in how to organize our main ideas to effectively put together a well written