Metacognitive Essay II

Making cars can be compared to writing. Every year they come out with a new model claiming it to be better than the last one because they corrected last year’s glitches. No matter how hard they improve on their mistakes, consumers always seem to find more to complain about. Even though others find my writing to be excellent, I always seem to find more mistakes that need correcting or changes that need improving. I have started using paragraph transitions to improve my essays and now I need to improve on them. I can now get my ideas to writing; however, I have the tendency to write too much words expressing just one idea. I added color to my writing to bring more life to it, but I write too much of it that it hides my ideas.
Too much color hurts the eyes and in my writing’s case, loses the reader’s interest by having too much of it. Color has been one of the main improvements of my writing so far, but I think I have been using it too much. My introduction sometimes tends to be too long because of too many details on it, but not on the topic of the essay. I put too much icing on the cake, but no effort in making the cake itself. Writing does need color and because of using it, it has helped catch my classmates’ interest, but I need to get the balance right. For me, writing is like painting a picture; you have to get every shade of color right for it to show your perspective, but not overdo it. I will strive in the future to make a catchy and short intro that points straight to what I am about to say. I will be a good cook and put just the right icing so people who eat my cake will taste the cake as well.
A cook should also know when to serve the entrée, dessert, or appetizer because those things work together to satisfy the customer. They build up one’s appetite to prepare for the main course. I have used paragraph transitions to build up my essay and connect them together like a full course dinner. I have been happy with that improvement because it is the first time I have used it. It has helped my writing a lot by making it flow more smoothly. By using this, I do not just suddenly throw things at the reader every end of a paragraph; I prepare them for the new ideas that are about to come to the next one. My only goal for this achievement is to improve on it. Since I just learned how to use it, the next step I will take will be practice. Just like how chefs know what kind of food to serve for every course, I will practice this skill to stimulate the appetite of the one reading my writing.
Too much food can also be bad for one person. If one has too much food, he might puke it all out and just waste what he ate. I am now better at getting my ideas out of my head and putting them to paper. However, I tend to concentrate on making my essays interesting and colorful that my ideas are hidden behind a wall of decorations. Sometimes there can be so much make-up that you can’t see one’s natural beauty. I will utilize my words to bring out my ideas, but not too much that the words confuses the reader or leads him to another thing that has no connection with what I’m trying to say.
Like car manufacturers, I’m working on my new model for writing next year. I will do that by re-evaluating how I have improved so far. My improvements like using paragraph transitions, starting to get my ideas to writing, and making it more colorful and catchy are nothing without practice. My main goal to be better at my writing will be to practice my newfound skills and improve them. Next year’s car models usually come out before that year. However, you need more than a year to get better on your writing. Watch out for my next model coming out soon…

Argumentative Paragraph

Companies pulling sodas out of schools.


All this time I’ve been here in America, the one thing that catches my attention is how everybody here is hooked on soda. Back in my country, I have a cousin that was drinking too much soda than she could handle and soda is not even that popular there. It went to the point where she had a complication on her kidneys that she was forced to stop. For this reason, I strongly support the companies’ decision to pull out sodas in schools. Obesity is a big issue in America and from the perspective of an immigrant like me, one of the cause is the availability of sodas here. Schools in my country didn’t have the budget to even buy chairs for the students, let alone vending machines for us to buy sodas and make ourselves blow up like balloons. I’ve also read through soda ingredients, which normal kids here wouldn’t normally do, but I think I’m smart enough to want to know the things they put in the food that I eat. I found out that they put acid in some sodas and that they are loaded with sugar, and stuff that I didn’t have the slightest idea what they are or even how to read them. would you drink something that you had absolutely no idea what’s in it or what is it? Besides all that good stuff I just mentioned, you can also have complications in your digestive and urinary sytem if you drink too much. We students might say that soda is better than water; however, if we look more closely, it has more calories than water and does not even rehydrate half as well as water. Sodas should be pulled out of vending machines in school to stop the health problems that they cause.

Argumentative Paragraph

"The Death Penalty should remain a legal form of punishment in New Mexico"


The death penalty goes a long way back in human history and has many different forms some of which are very gruesome. We have dealt with this issue for a long time and we are still dealing with this today. The death penalty should not remain a legal form of punishment in New Mexico. I believe there is other worse form of punishments than death itself, which, in my opinion, is not really a punishment, but a release from the punishments of this chaotic world. Moreover, there are innocent people who are sentenced with death penalty, which is not fair both for the convicted and his family. Others might think that death does more justice to the victim than other forms of punishment; however, killing somebody only brings the victims to the same level as the criminal and as most of us have been taught the value of forgiveness, we should just forgive them and let their conscience punish them. Death should not remain as a legal form of punishment. None of us have the right to take away life and death is not really a punishment, but a release form it.

Argumentative Paragraph

"All drugs, including alcohol and tobacco, should be legal."


There was a period in American History when alcohol was illegalized. The government called it Prohibition. It was a move that failed miserably, just like how the war on drugs is now failing miserably, Prohibition was like that until they made a move to legalize alcohol, which eventually solved the problem. We should emulate the past and do it on all drugs that are illegal now. Making them legal stops teens from thinking that they are rebelling against their parents by using them and divert their attention away from it. People might think that the idea is radical; however, radical ideas are the ones that have greatly shaped our nation for us to become what we are now, a superpower. Alcohol and all other drugs should be legal to get people’s attention away from them and make them oblivious to it.

Gates Millenium Essay 1

Discuss the subjects in which you excel or have excelled. To what factors do you attribute your success?


I have always been proficient at every subject that I have taken. Math is not everybody’s favorite subject, but I think it is challenging and fun; history is my favorite subject and I love studying it; science for me is as challenging as math, but twice the fun. In my opinion, I have done fairly well in all of them. However, I would say that the subject that I have excelled in at my school is English. Back on my sophomore year, I really hated writing essays because I easily got bored of the work. Other aspects of English such as grammar was fine with me and I was proficient with them, but when it comes to writing essays, I found it hard to put my ideas into writing. I preferred saying my ideas, but writing, I thought, wasn’t for me. Because of that, English wasn’t a subject that I looked forward to at school. Nevertheless I knew I needed to learn how to write essays because I would have great need of that skill for college.
However, over the next few years I began to like writing. By learning the writing process and working on different topics that interested me, writing them began to get easier for me. Because of my English teacher’s help, I began to love English and at the same time I began to excel in it. Now I’m one of the top students in my English class as well as my year. English is one of the classes where my grade is the highest and English is not even my native language.
Every subject I have been in, I have had excelled. However, I feel English was the one that I really had a hard time dealing with and triumphed. It was a great challenge for me and my hard work and diligence finally paid off. I had some obstacles I had to cross in other subjects as well, but I had loved those subjects and I felt those were not really my hardest trials. Conquering your fears, finally facing your hardest test and not only overcoming it, but learning to love it in the end is how you really excel. English was the hardest trial I had to face among my classes and I conquered and came on top.

Potential to Contribute Essay

Marco Creer
Tohatchi High School
Potential to Contribute



My goal for going to college and being a nurse will be to help my family, not only here in United States, but also in the Philippines including my cousins and their families there. Being a nurse will be a great opportunity for me to travel, help people, and see the world. Furthermore, as a nurse, I will volunteer in any communities that need nurses here in United States and in any country. I have heard of some countries having great need for nurses than we do and I want to help them. I need to go to college so i can help out my family back home. Since we have only been here in this country for a short period, we weren't able to save money for college. My relatives back home need the money more than we do. The only way I can go to college is by getting a scholarship or through financial aid programs. I am almost a senior here in Tohatchi and I am currently looking for scholarships that I can apply for college. This program will enable me to fulfill my dream of being a nurse so I can help, not only those patients in hospitals, but my community and others around the world. Furthermore this program will aid me in my college application process when I am a senior and help me understand how applications for financial aids and scholarships work.

Essay on Othello by William Shakespeare

"Why Iago chose to destroy Othello and Desdemona even though he was jealous of Cassio..."



My grandpa, who was a gardener, told me once how to properly kill weeds. You must pull them by the roots or poison its nourishment in order for it not to grow back and kill your crop. I think Iago knew my grandpa. Iago must have followed that advice because my grandpa was such an expert at gardening. The only thing is, gardening was not where Iago used that advice.
Iago did hate Cassio for being the lieutenant instead of him, but Cassio was just the weed’s leaves. Iago wanted to destroy Othello because of his failure to see the achievements he has done that Cassio did not have. Iago expressed this hatred of Othello to Roderigo in Act I, Scene I, when they were planning to tell Barbantio of his daughter’s disappearance in the hands of Othello. He used Desdemona, the one that’s nourishing the roots, against Othello, the roots of all his hatred.
Iago did not intend to destroy Desdemona,in Act III, Scene III, Line 525, he even asked Othello to let her live when Othello told him he wanted to kill her. He tarnished Desdemona’s clean reputation to make Othello suspicious and mistrustful of her. He was pulling the roots while poisoning the soil because he knew that when both are gone, the leaves would wither and die leaving him to harvest the crop.
Iago knew that if he destroyed Othello, then he would have more of what he wanted. He did not view Cassio as a real threat because he had him dancing in the palm of his hand by the way that he was manipulating him to make Othello jealous. He did not intend to destroy Desdemona, Othello did that himself. Iago almost executed his plan if it weren’t for his wife, Emilia, who revealed his intentions of becoming rich and wanting to be the new leader in Othello’s place. The gardener was bitten by an ant and jerked his hand from the weed to kill it instead of fully pulling out all of its roots. My grandpa forgot to tell him that when you pull out weeds, you can pull out ants as well.

Metacognitive Essay

People; no matter how perfect they seem to be, like Olympic gold medalist Shaun White is to snowboarders, can have mistakes even in what they do best. Writing is what I do best and I’ve always been good at it against my will. However, I do have my strength and weaknesses in writing. My writing strengths, so far, has been my grammar, spelling, and organization. Nevertheless, I could use strong verbs to bring my writings to life and good paragraph transitions to improve my writing. Widening my arsenal of vocabularies will also be part of my strategy to improve my writing and to better bring out my ideas into writing.
Speaking of ideas, mulling over ideas on what to write about the subject is a breeze for me. Even before I begin writing, they start flooding through my mind like an angry waterfall. To make the reader understand my ideas I need to spell them right, and spelling is one of my basic instinct second only to my other basic instinct to spot a hot chick a mile away. Anyway, spelling comes natural to me as an actor is with acting and every time I write something, even if it’s just a note to a friend, I always check my spelling. I’m also an actor when it comes to writing. I love pretending to be somebody else and I love it. Acting through writing is way better than the real thing if you’re like me who can never cope with stage fright. Acting, however is not just one of my talents, I’m also a good follower. If there is an outline, I can follow it right away like a bloodhound and improve on it.
Improvement, however, is what I should apply in my writing as a whole and not just on outlines. Part of my writing which I would love to improve is showing my ideas that are still on my mind through writing. The floods of ideas inside my head are just too much for my puny hand to handle. My spelling instinct even fails me when my hand tries to keep up with my brain. My head is too occupied with my ideas that I rely too much on pre-made outlines to put them together obliterating other creative ways I could have weaved them together like a fine silk that would’ve caught the most particular tailor of all. Color, an important part of any silk for it to attract attention and sell itself, is also what my writing needs. I need color and more action to my voice to make it more convincing and, if I was making a movie, to be Oscar-winning.
I’ve heard amazing things about how Oscar-winning movies are made and how actors resort to ways just to be like their character in those movies. Those movies use the movie-making process effectively to have a good movie to please the critic’s eye. Using the writing process is the same as movie-making, in my opinion, and one of my strategies to improve my writing should be to use it effectively to polish my ideas and please my critic’s eye. To polish my ideas, I need to start with organizing my thinking to utilize the floods of ideas to use in my writing, like how a river supports entire civilizations, otherwise, the river could easily flood and wipe it all out of history. I could further improve it by using strong verbs to make a more convincing voice and to draw the audience in like a good movie.
Writing is like a movie for me, it brings a message, represents a voice, it can be told in many perspectives, and it must keep the audience on the edge of their seats. I want the audience who reads my writing to feel like they are watching a movie, or inside another person’s mind. To do that, I need to improve on my writing strengths and weaknesses not just by organizing my ideas, using stronger verbs, and being creative in my paragraphs and organization, but in all its aspects including emotional and physical aspects.

Raft

To: The Students of Tohatchi and Community Members


As you all know, our school mascot has been the Cougar for a long time. It has represented our school in many sports and we have won many tournaments with it. It has been our inspiration for many years, but it is time for us to change it.

I believe that this change is for the good of the whole school. Changing it to a Native American mascot, I believe, better represents our school and us. The cougar has served our school well for a long time and it is with my deepest sorrow in changing it. However, a Native American mascot represents us better. Let’s forge a new history for this mascot and may it be a great one!

Your opinions are greatly appreciated, of course. You, as students, should have a say in this, as you are the ones that keeps the school spirit and mascot alive. Community members’ opinions are welcome, too. All your comments and opinions please let me know.


Respectfully Yours,

Your Principal

Raft

To my General’s general, the sweet and lovely Desdemona:


As you witnessed last night, the fair and just General Othello has taken away from me my position as lieutenant. I assume you didn’t know the reason for this and as the noble General’s wife, I thought that you have the right to know. I was dismissed because of the commotion that I caused while my judgment was impaired by wine, the substance that brings every man down to his feet.
It wasn’t my intention at all to cause the commotion and, with all due respect to the general, Othello would have not been able to control himself if he was under the influence of it. Moreover, you my lady, I am sure, know the real me when I am not on that foul thing’s influence and my wits about me.
I am afraid that my dear general Othello, although I am not sure it is even possible, made an unfair decision when I myself could not even speak for my own defense during the occasion. Therefore, now I speak in my defense to you, my compassionate lady, to speak to your dear husband of my appeal. I know he is now reluctant to hear me, but he will most gladly listen to your every word. Does not everybody deserve second chances? Is it not that how Othello got your father’s approval by telling his side of the story?