letter to reader

Dear Reader,
             This is a collection of some of my best pieces that I wrote during the first semester of my senior year at Penfield High School. I wrote these in my English elective, College Composition, with Ms Basko. These are all unfinished papers that have been reviewed by my peers and teachers and somewhat revised by myself over the semester.
              College Composition, I didn't really know what to expect when I first started the class. I had heard rumors that we write our college essays and other things but it was nothing like what I expected. We learned many different types of papers; characterization, exemplification and narrative to name a few. Ms Basko forced me to expand my creativeness to a point that I had never been before. This was very good for me because I am not a naturally creative person so pushing me to be creative was something that I wasn't very happy about but in the long run it really paid off which I am glad about.   
              These pieces cover a variety of different writing styles and topics that we learned and studied. For most of our papers we would read an example of a writing style and we would break it down and find what we needed to do to write this paper in a similar way. After that we would do peer revisions to see where we could expand on ideas or continue thoughts more in depth.
            The new conclusions I did for my 7 deadly sins paper were a way for us to practice writing new conclusions that really summarized and emphasized what I wanted the reader to understand. My picture paper was probably my favorite paper that I wrote this year. It is the most incomplete but I was able to write a story about whatever I wanted to and had the freedom to do what I wanted. The "how to" paper was also very fun to write because it was also very open-ended and it was the only group writing we did. We got to choose what we wanted to teach people, we chose "how to utilize your senior skip day". We chose this because we wanted to make sure that our classmates didn't mess up the most classic day of your high school experience. Next we needed to reflect on our 7 deadly sins paper, this was difficult for me because I couldn't find a topic that I liked and could write a good story for. I ended up doing soccer because I felt that I am very knowledgeable about the subject. Our next paper was one that we could really "take a bite out of", it was my food paper about chocolate chip cookies. We spent a whole class taste testing different brands of cookies and talking about them in groups. Then we had to write a paper about the different cookies that we ate and compare them. I talked about which ones I liked and which ones I disliked along with more details such as texture how moist they were and so on. After that we were challenged to write 3 new introductions to our food paper, we did this to practice grabbing the attention of the reader while still addressing the topic of our paper. This was one of the hardest things for me to do because most of my papers in the past were very bland and didn't have good intros, but I am very pleased with how these turned out.  
            In the beginning of this class I wasn't a very strong writer, I didn't feel comfortable writing, and I didn't enjoy it at all. I really struggled with my introductions and being creative with things such as titles and ways to catch the readers attention. I also wasn't able to expand my ideas and make the story "flow" together.
            After the semester was over I felt like I was able to write more creatively and thoroughly than I could at the beginning. I also think that I was able to complete my thoughts and tell the reader what I wanted to in a way that was interesting and attention grabbing.
            I wish that I could have had more time to work on some of these pieces because I felt I had good ideas but wasn't able to finish. I would have rather done 2-3 very well written papers this semester than the 10-12 drafts we did. 
           Overall this class was very good for me as a writer because it forced me to go out of my comfort zone with my writing and expand my views on writing papers. This was very beneficial to me and was a good step towards getting me ready for college next year.

I hope you enjoy

Eric DeHond

7 deadly conclusions

Here are my two new Conclusions for my "7 deadly sins at a soccer game". The first one is more directed at the 7 deadly sins and the second is more directed towards the soccer aspect of the story.

1. Deadly sins are deadly for a reason....they will kill you if you commit them, so dont do it. As you can see by this night at a soccer game these sins make life so much more complicated for everyone around you and they will probably want to kill you which could be another reason they are called the 7 deadly sins.

2. Soccer games are usually a family friendly environment that shouldnt be ruined by people committing the worst sins know to man. People like the ones at the game that saturday night need to rethink their priorities in life and start living a more positive one.

Climbing

Ms. basko,
1.I would like you look at my intro because its suppose to be more of a story and I want to make sure the intro makes sense.
2. Also please look at my first 2 paragraphs and see where I could improve
3. Please give me ideas on how I could continue this story.
This was my favorite paper to write because it allowed me to write about what I want and I also had a lot of different directions i could take when writing this. I had trouble find a picture that I could write an extensive, detailed story about. As soon as I found this one I was able to start writing and I had a good idea from the beginning which made it fun because I knew what I wanted to do. This was one paper I wish we could have had more time to work on it.

                      I am ____, I am a 27 year old from Denver, CO. this is a collection of my life experiences as a climber. If you have found this then I am probably not here anymore and would you please return to my family.

                     

                      I have always had a passion for climbing, even going all the way back to when I could crawl. My parents told me that they couldn’t leave me alone for 2 seconds or I would be trying to get on the couch, or coffee table. They were always afraid that something would happen to me, and they still do, but they are more comfortable because I have a lot more experience. My mom is always worried about me when I go on a big climb and she gets very upset if I don’t let her know that I made it down.  My dad on the other hand wants to go with me, which would be ok if he didn’t have 2 bad knees and a back that freaks out if you give him a message. I still go with him on hikes in the local state parks which he enjoys but feels it for the next week. He was always outdoors and got me interested in climbing in the first place it is sad that I cant climb with him more but I understand why.

May 24, 1995

                     

September, 25, 1995

                       It’s been three days now and there is still no sign of the storm letting up. We look out our tents and can barely see the other tent right next to ours. It is 20 degrees below zero and we only have enough food to last the week. Oh and by the way it’s Thursday morning, I think. We are finding ways to pass the time; sleeping playing cards and every once in while go outside to fix the flaps on the tent so we don’t blow away. The wind has to have reached speeds of nearly 35 MPH which isn’t too bad except when you have to go out there because little pieces of ice are flying all over the place and it hurts like a mother if it hits you. Our biggest difficulty now is just staying alive, with very little sun light throughout the day the temperature continues to drop each day and with no sighs of it letting up we could be in trouble.

Senior Skip day

At first I really liked this assignment because it was a way to be creative and funny. We were able to write about something that applied to us which made this a lot of fun. Fred and I just brainstormered ideas that would work and came up with senior skip day. We had trouble coming up with how we were going to structure the paper and came up with stating what to do how to plan it and something else I dont remember cause I dont have the paper fred does. once we got going it was very easy but it was harder to get started than i thought it would be. To fix it we would add a conclusion and fix some of our bullet points. If I were to fix it I would give it a better intro that was more catchy.

Kelsey, Fred, Eric

How to Utilize Your Senior Skip Day

Senior skip day is a day in which seniors don’t go to any of their classes and instead enjoy a day of leisure and fun.  It’s a tradition most commonly seen in Canadian and American high schools.  On this day the whole senior classes excuse themselves from school and do things.  Popular skip days have been known to fall on Halloween, April 20^th and May 5^th.  On this particular day someone can do a countless number of things, and it should be something exciting.  So this paper is a guide to help you utilize your day off from school productively. 

Steps to plan a senior skip day so that it actually works

            Many times in high school a bunch of seniors may randomly decide to skip school and tell a couple of people, hoping it will get out and other seniors will get the memo.  However this is not always effective, and many times only a handful of kids actually end up hearing about it.  If it’s not planned and thought out it wont’ happen.  In some cases being spontaneous is alright, but in this case it isn’t a good idea.  We thought up some ways that you can be sure that this day will happen.  Some ideas are listed below. 

• Make a Facebook group
• Text every senior in your contacts
• Make an announcement in the commons during free
• Get a teacher to agree on the date so they can pass it on to all their senior students
• Talk an administrator into going on the intercom or morning announcements to prodcast the date

The wrong way to spend your senior skip day

When given the privileged not to attend school there are certain things you should not do.  It’s you day off, so you should be having fun and not be boring.  Many people look at this day as a way to catch up on sleep or do an essay that’s due the next day, but this is not a good idea.  On your day off you should take advantage of the opportunity and not do the following listed below. 

• sleep
• do homework
• go to school
• work
• clean
• not hang out with people
• get arrested
• drive your siblings to school
• Get caught

The correct way to spend your senior skip day

As stated in the previous paragraph your senior skip day should not be boring.  If senior skip day is on a Friday the following would work out better because an extended weekend means more time to enjoy your day off. Some ideas on how to accomplish this are listed below. 

• Road trip
• Go to the beach
• Do something unoriginal
• Go to a baseball game
• Steal your friends dad’s car
• Not getting arrested
• Not getting caught
• Giant water balloon war (if it’s warm)
• Go to a football game

7 kinda deadly sins

When I first started writing my 7 deadly sins paper I didnt really know where to start cause I had a lot of options. I decided on a soccer game because I knew I could be very detailed and knew a lot about the topic. My draft was more about getting the general idea on the paper rather than getting a good story down. It was hard getting down ideas at first but once I got going it got easier.
My draft isnt very detailed and needs a lot of work but its a good start and will be good. Based on my green sheet I need to work on my details and expanding on my ideas. My ideas are good they are just incomplete or very broad and doesn't give the reader the effect I want them to have when they read my paper.

Eric DeHond

It was a Saturday night just like any other, except something would happen tonight that hasn’t happened in a very long time, everyone at the soccer game that night would commit one of the seven deadly sins.

            The first of them, gluttony started with most of the fans before the game started, they were out in the parking lot tailgating, drinking beer, and stuffing their faces with burgers and hot dogs, almost to the point of them throwing it all back up. This happened at all home games and has been a “tradition” since the team came to town nearly 10 years ago. The older men have put on a lot of weight because of the “tradition” and their families were not far behind. As a result some of the older men are developing heart problems and have no idea. Gluttony continued during the game with the drinking of alcohol and the continuous eating of food.

            Greed, something that was not hard to find on that Saturday night, began at the ticket booth, pushing and shoving to get to the front of the line even though the game was no where near sold out. These people were the fans that everyone hates, the ones that come to like one game a year and just get so drunk they ruin the game for those around them. Even the employees “participated” in the sins, one of the more experienced workers asked their boss for a significant raise and the boss told the employee “No we will talk about this at the end of the year.” “What?” the employee said. “I deserve this more than anyone else here!” and other comments that cant not be repeated. 

            Pride, this began in the locker room with one of the “stars” of the league, he was talking about how good he was and how bad the other team was. He also said that he was going to score at least 3 goals that night. He ended up getting shut down and barely touched the ball all night.

            Wrath occurred with the referee, there were multiple fouls that game that he gave cards for that were very questionable.

            Sloth, the game the other night was the first place team against the last place team and the owner of the last place team began to drift into a daze because his team was getting destroyed.

            Envy, on the bench many of the players committed this because they were jealous of the fact that they were not playing in the game when they think that they deserve a chance more that some people out there.

            Lust, in one of the suites the players wives are all sitting together watching the game,  and some of the people they were sitting in there with them are admiring the players wives in a way that was unreasonable. 

intro to food

Ms. Basko challenged us to expand our thinking so that we could be more creative in our introductions. She wanted us to be able to capture the attention of the reader yet still tell the reader what the paper is about in some way. I am not a creative person so doing this was really a struggle for me to get started but as soon as I got one done the other ones were a lot easier.


1. Cookies, usually round, moist and filled to max with anything you want. These pieces of dough have been enjoyed by millions everyday since 1930. Ruth Wakefield the genius behind the chocolate chip cookies started making them for the guests at her Massachusetts hotel. One day a friend of hers Andrew Nestle offered her all the chocolate she needed to make the cookies in exchange for her famous recipe. She accepted and the rest is history. In class we did a taste test to see how the recipe as changed throughout the years, here are my results.


2. The smell, its a very unique and recognizable one. The one you smell when your outside playing baseball with the neighbors and going running inside to get some. Its the smell that makes your mouth water when you first smell it. Can you guess? the one, the only chocolate chip cookie. If you couldn't guess it at first now you know what I mean. There are many ways to make these unbelievable cookies so my English class decided to find out which cookie is best, and here are my results.  


3. "Oreo, milks favorite cookie" has been the slogan of Oreo cookies for years but I have to disagree. The original cookies, chocolate chip, are the best cookies and are the ones that milk enjoys the most. These cookies are the ones that most people drink milk with. So I decided to check and see which chocolate chip cookie is the best out of all of them.

Reflective food

1. When I first began to write this paper I needed to know different kinds of chocolate chip cookies, their taste, size, and texture. I thought it was gonna be very delicious but it turned out being disgusting because the cookies didn't taste good. I struggled with using descriptive words that help the reader know how what the cookies were like. the easiest part was the taste testing because it was the least stressful. and the hardest part was the descriptions I talked about earlier.
2. When I read my draft I really liked the format of the paper, the descriptions and the variety of vocab. I think that I need to elaborate more about each cookie.
3. My partner said I need to fix the into which I have done they also said to use more adjectives when talking about the texture. They also said it was vague which I have worked on.
4. I plan on fixing the introduction to make it more relevant to the paper. I'm also going to fix the descriptions to make it so that the reader can relate more to how I feel about the cookies.    

The original: good gone bad

The word “cookie” is derived from the Dutch word 'koekje', which meant "small or little cake." The word “biscuit” (which is what a cookie is called in some countries) comes from the Latin phrase “bis coctum”, which means, "twice baked." The chocolate chip cookie was invented in 1930 by Ruth Wakefield in Whitman, Massachusetts while she was baking for guests at her bed a breakfast. She ran out of baking chocolate so she decided to use some chocolate that a friend of hers, Andrew Nestle gave to her. She made a deal with Nestle so that she would get free chocolate and she would let Nestle put her recipe on their boxes of chocolate. After that there are many different companies that make chocolate. Our class did a taste test of different foods and we took notes on the taste, texture, and what it looked like my evaluations are as fallows.

Pepperidge farm, Montauk chocolate chip cookies, probably one of the most vial things I have ever eaten in my entire life. The packaging made the cookie look very moist with good texture and very chocolaty, almost homemade. Unfortunately this is far from the case; these “homemade” cookies tasted some what sour. They had two different types of chocolate one seemed to taste like normal chocolate and the other kind was the type that tasted sour.

Archway, chocolate chip cookie, a red rectangular box with a big cookie on the front and said “Just like homemade”, they looked soft and moist with a rigid texture on the top. These cookies, once again did not taste homemade, they were moist but just didn’t have the “chocolate” flavor that chocolate chip cookie are suppose to have.

Wegmans, “Famous” chocolate chip cookies are usually very well made, chocolaty and taste as if they are fresh out of the oven. These on the other hand, didn’t taste like normal Wegmans chocolate chip cookies, they were moist but bland similar to the Archway cookies.  They also smelled like raisins, which would be fine if they were “raisin cookies” but since they didn’t smell like chocolate chip cookie then they wouldn’t taste like them either.

            Chips Ahoy! Famous for the talking cookies in television commercials, and of course their cookies. Their “Original” cookies are crispy, not stale but they aren’t “fall apart” in your mouth. These are probably the best cookies that are talked about in this paper. They had the most flavor, not as moist as I would have liked but tolerable. They were also the most enjoyed by almost everyone in our group.

            Murray Sugar Free chocolate chip cookies, these were the only sugar free cookies we had, and they tasted like it. These cookies were tasteless, if you put chocolate chips on bread and put it in an oven it would probably taste better. I was hesitant trying them just based on the picture on the box and also because sweet and sugar free shouldn’t be mixed up!

            Keebler, know for their little elves that live in trees they make a large variety of treats, most of the time they are very delicious, their original cookies…..not so much. They were dry and crumbly, and lacked the chocolate necessary for good chocolate chip cookies.

            Overall most of these cookies very awful, for different reasons, lack of flavor, bland, to crunchy etc. The Chips Ahoy was definitely the best ones because they had the best overall taste, presentation and texture.