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Kimberly Ortiz

Professor Batty

English 028

13 December 2017

Learning Writing Skills from Holly Batty

In my English 028 course I learned many things from my professor. She has taught us the three-

pass approach, methods of development, how to write narrative/ argumentative essays, construct

paragraphs, come up with a thesis, how to sandwich a quote, and taught us CRAAP. I loved this English

course because Professor Batty taught us so much, meanwhile making the course fun.

For the three-pass approach, one must go through the preview. The preview step has the reader

to go through the front cover of a novel which consist of title, picture, and author of the novels. It also

has the reader go through the back cover which provides them with a gist of the novel and quotes from

it. This step allows the reader to predict, ask questions, plan the duration of reading the book and pay

close attention to vocabulary. The second step is to annotate the text. Annotation has the reader

highlight things that stood out and write down why those things stood out. The reader should also

highlight personal connections and main ideas. Professor Batty also had us do reading journals which

had us practice citing quotations and highlighting main points. We practiced the annotating step with

these reading journals. The third and final step of the three-pass approach would be reflecting on the

novel or passage the reader has read. This step has the reader start with a summary of the text and will

make the reader try to remember what they read, this process would also help when studying for a test.

This three-pass approach helped me better understand the novel How the Garcia Girls Lost their

Accents and helped me a lot in writing my argumentative essay since I had to provide evidence from

the novel and other articles I read. Going through the process of this approach made it easier to provide

the evidence I needed for the essay and I will honestly keep using it for future references.
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Professor Batty also taught us how to construct paragraphs. I already knew how, but she

refreshed by memory about what was necessary to provide in paragraphs. One thing to provide would

be a topic sentence for each paragraph. These topic sentences must be provided at the beginning of

each paragraph and must talk about the topic of each paragraph. Each paragraph should have at least

three ideas and each must be supported by examples, evidence, data or stats, and details. A writer must

also provide a conclusion which restates what the whole point of the paragraph was and why it was

important and states these things in a clear manner. During this lesson I also learned a new word,

coherence, I had never heard it before, but now I know it means pointing words, repeating words, or

transitions. I always loved attending Professor Battys class because although sometimes she would just

refresh my memories on some topics, she would help me learn new approaches, skills, and vocabulary.

In this course, I also learned about CRAAP. Which stands for current, relevant, authority,

accuracy, and purpose. These five things which a reader should look for when researching a topic and

using evidence from that research article. The article one must use should be current and up to date. It

must be relevant to the topic you are discussing in your essay and the researchers should never just stick

to the first article they find. They must conduct advance research to see if the information in an article is

valid and similar to other articles. Authority is the most important thing to look for when one is about to

use an article as research. If an article about the mind is written by someone who is a chef, the article is

not authorized by someone with expertise. If the researcher wants a valid and authorized article, the

author of the article about the mind must be familiar with the brain or at least a degree that has to do

with the topic. The article must also have accurate information. Thought that are backed up by evidence

and so forth and but never be bias. The author of the article must provide a purpose for it in order for

the article to be validated information. Professor Batty has also given us many websites that seem to be

legitimate and those that are not. I use the CRAAP method not only for the assignments I had for my
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English course, but other courses I was taking this semester. This method allowed me to find many

articles that were right for my assignments, and I will keep using the method.

Although I only discussed three topics I learned in Professor Battys English 028 course. There

were many more things I learned in her class that I will remain using for future references. Everything

she has taught us not only apply to English courses, but to other courses as well. The flexibility of her

methods is what help me in other classes and is what makes me keep using them. Her class was full of

information and I had a blast learning from her and attending her lectures.