August 22, 2011

Dear Dr. Rivera and my fellow classmates,
Today, we started reading Chapter 1, "Reading for Thinking, Discussion, and Writing." In this segments that we were able to cover in today's lesson basically taught us the techniques of reading paragraphs. Some of those techniques were underlining, which is mainly pointing out the main ideas in paragraphs, along with the support. Annotating, which is writing notes in the margins that represents intense involvement and shows that the brain is building its muscles, according to Dr. Rivera. Outlining, which is reducing a paragraph into simple parts so that at a glance, it's easy to see the relationship of ideas. And taking notes, which helps you refer back directly to what you just read. After this part of the lesson, we completed exercise 1 and it seemed pretty easy. We also learned the reading-based writing forms such as writing a summary to paragraphs, evaluating a summary, writing a reaction, and writing a two-part response. Then, we completed exercise 2 which was evaluating a summary, and I must agree with Jhorge that it was a bit difficult to match the 9 rules to the sentences that were shown in the passage, within the time frame that was given to us, I even got some sentences mixed up and matched with the wrong numbers. All in all, today was a good class session and it helped refresh my memory of how to construct paragraphs and such. I'm looking forward to the next lessons and class session.

Sincerely,
Chelsea Sablan