Explore the Writing Style

It has been quite a few years I am in touch with writing. Personally, writing is not my strong side, each time when teachers peer editing my paper, red dots and comments are everywhere. In order to improve my writing skills, my teacher Ms. Davis back in high school taught me many ways and styles of writing. What kind of paper is persuasive? What type of writing style belongs to narrative? At what time we could use first person to write the piece? Many questions are popping up in my head, and at least I guess this is what she has successfully taught me, also, brainstorming.

On Tuesday’s writing class, we were told to bring two copies of our third draft essay. Each one was joined in 3 people’s group, and we were in chance to revise each other’s pieces. Very useful. I have to say one of the classmates in my group gave me so many great ideas about my Literacy Memoir essay. In other words, she suggested me to change the way of Defoe’s (the writer of the Adventure of Robinson Crusoe) part, avoid the “old fashion”, and to make it perfectly fit in my story. Moreover, she prompted me to put a few sentences somewhere that says I was still inspired by the story today. Therefore, I had more connection between the story and my own experience.

Overall, the class provided us a great opportunity to receive more suggestion and advices from each other, and do great on our essay!

Chef Shuna with Her Type of Biography

By reading chef Shuna Fish Lydon’s personal blog called Eggbeater, she briefly introduced her background, working experiences and interests. It is easy to tell that she uses first person point of view wrote the biography, and she mostly targeted on her personal experiences. Specifically, she firstly told audience how she named her blog, why she named the blog “Eggbeater”. Then she mainly targeted on introducing her field of work, for example, she is a professional on-the-job trained chef for over 16 years in New York, California and London, and she listed the places where she works before. In addition, she is an instructor, consultant and food writer-for-hire. Lastly, she wrote down all her interests, and I guess this is the way she can make more interaction and connection with those people who are interested in looking at her blog.

Related to narrative elements she used, she wrote her biography in chronological order, about when she works in either San Francisco, or New York. Also, she describes her personality in using several adjective words, like tough, thorough, methodical and efficient. In this way, audience could directly know what kind of person she is, and what kind of personality builds her to get success. In addition, I think she uses metaphor, secretly told us she is major in pastry chef by using “Eggbeater” as her blog’s name. Like everyone knows, eggbeater is one most important machine when you baking. Last but not the least, she uses listing to divide her biography into three parts: background of the blog, herself and her interests.

General Speaking, she chooses to use internet to make connection with people, and let us know who she is. Also, I can tell she is really friendly that welcomes everyone enjoys her type of writing and her special posts in the blog.

Shuna Fish Lydon’s blog: http://eggbeater.typepad.com/

My Learning Progress

I have to say this is really a valuable writing class for me to learn more things. In recent Tuesday class, I learned the elements to write narrative essay. Specifically, by using first person, narrator should include setting, dialogue, tension, character and theme in the story. In other words, setting includes time, location, social condition, and background, and these are the most basic elements to write a story.

The most interesting element that I would like to mention is tension. As everyone noticed, movies and books always use tension to grab readers’ attention, and it is a lot easier to use this conflict to make the story in detail. In addition, there are four kinds of conflicts: person verses person, person verses environment, person verses society, and person verses himself. For example, in the movie Star Wars: A New Hope, the empire has conflict with the resistance. In other words, it is can be seen as a conflict of good verses evil. Therefore, the story would be more dramatic if the writer uses tension to plot the story.

Overall, this is what I have learned that can beneficial to my own Literacy Memoir. Moreover, I believe this is a handy material that people should spend time to think about;)  

Cooking and Pop Culture

It is perfect that pop culture are linked with dessert making. Being a chef is one of my dreams when I was little. However, there are many of TV shows and movies convinced me to be a chef in the future. One of my favorite TV shows that related to cooking and baking are called Top Chef: Just Dessert. In this show, it mainly tests pastry chef’s cooking skills, creativity, imagination, and team awareness. Chefs need to come up with their own ideas about their dessert. In addition, it is a challenge that chefs are in race to finish their showpieces in a limit time either in individual or group work.  Thus, this is one of the reasons I would want to be a chef.

Without doubt, being a chef is not that easy. It contains many challenges, techniques, and skills. Nutrition and food science are the courses are required to take for this area, not only that, it shapes ourselves to be more creative, and make life goes colorful!

Special terms that associated with this field:

NFG (non-functional garniture)

Dressing

Creation

Ingredient

About Me

This is Quan Gan, a freshman girl from China. My major in Accounting, in order to achieve my dream to be a professional accountant, I choose to attend to Michigan State University to study business field.

In this blog, I would mostly focus on the journals that professor assigned to us, also, something interesting that based on my major and interests.  Honestly, I decided to be an accountant because I think this is one major or job that could use worldwide. In addition, as an accountant, it can helps ourselves along with our life, for example how to manage the money and maximum the value of it. In my daily life, I love baking and traveling, one of my dream is to go to Italy to learn cooking for one year. Thus, I would love to share my interests and experiences with all of the people in my blog. Basically, my goal for the blog is to improve my writing habit, especially by keeping write journals, and comments on each other’s blogs, find more weakness in my writing process. Personally, grammar is the part that I need to put the most efforts on. Besides that, I need to focus on enlarging my vocabulary, fixing grammar mistakes, and practicing sentence variety.

Overall, by creating this blog, I believe I could enjoy writing, learn more from my own writing process, and gain as many as knowledge from others!