Essay Writing Class 2010

This is the blog site for Essay Writing, a class at Tsurumi University. The blog posts here are mainly from 2010, as the course started in April 2010 and finished up on Jan. 11, 2011. You will find teacher instructions, student essays and unedited student blog comments on this site. Students were 2nd and 3rd year English majors at Tsurumi University. In the Essay Writing course, each student wrote 8 essays plus revisions during the school year. They also made many blog posts and did various writing and grammar exercises in class.

To anyone who has just stumbled onto this blog site, the organization may seem a little confusing. That's because this site was not designed for the general public. It's mainly a support site for the Essay Writing class. The class meets in a computer room at Tsurumi University, and I can tell the students, "OK, please log onto the site and look at the latest post." We then look at the blog posts together and I give additional explanation. Consequently, this is not really a "blog" in the typical sense, but rather a classroom aid.

One of the advantages to this procedure is that I don't waste paper on handouts. More importantly though, students can access the information from anywhere, even from their smart phones. That way the information is never lost. I can also post links in the post, which is something that can't be done with a paper handout. Finally, students are able to see reminders and essay due dates from any computer or smart phone, so there is never an excuse for forgetting an assignment!

Now that the school year is finished, I am posting some of the best essays of the year on this site. Rather than post them on one blog page, however, I am posting them in the "Comments" boxes of older posts around the time the essay was submitted. Hopefully, this will provide some context for the essays. To make these student essays easy to find, I am posting the titles here below with links to the pages they are on.

The final essays you see posted were either submitted to me as hard copies in class or by email. I then made written corrections on the printed copies and passed them back to the students. Students then had to resubmit their revised essays. Sometimes a third edit was necessary.

The final essays should be almost error free due to our editing process. If you look at the comments accompanying each blog post, however, you will see many "live" posts submitted by students in class which are not edited. These unedited student comments will give the reader an idea of the actual writing level of our students when they write spontaneously. Obviously, editing is important for a good essay, so we make a distinction between English blogging and English essay writing.

Thank you for taking the time to check out this Essay Writing blog site. You may also wish to view our restaurant review site, Tsurumi Eats!, a site which we hope has the appearance of a "real" blog.

Now, here are links to some of the final essays. Thank you for taking a look!

My Grandmother's Story by Potchama (Narration Essay)

How I Changed My Way of Thinking about Our Neighbor, Korea by Swwie (Change Essay)

How to be a Great Guitarist by Yuta (How to ... Essay)

TV is Good for Children by Junna (Opinion Essay)

Traditional Japanese Bonito Fisheries by CCC (Data Essay)

My Friend's Escape by K (Narration Essay)

A Spiritual Experience by Ken (Narration Essay)