Our Webcam Website

We are doing a website discussing webcams and the dangers of using them. We have specific tabs geared toward parents and another tab for teens. We then use a different persuasive technique for each audience. When it comes to parents, we talk about the positives of webcams and with teens we show the negatives in order to scare them from doing anything dangerous with their webcams. It is going really well so far when it comes to each person doing their share of the project. The creation of the actual website itself is pretty easy do to the template we are using. Our group gets along well and i am sure that our website will look great as well.

How to Make an Essay Interesting

After reading the Media/Design chapter in Nortan Field Guide I began to think about the many newpaper stories and essays I have read throughout my life. Some have been particularly hard to get through, and I think that's because nothing about them ever popped out to get my attention. Scholarly essays are usually written in the standard Times New Roman font with a 1o pt font. A boring, small font tends to make me zone out while I'm reading, but the large type of newspaper headlines always get my attention. I especially love when the stories include graphs and pictures which pull me toward the story. Although some fonts and pictures aren't appropriate for certain articles, I try to get those attention grabbers in my essays as often as possible.

Intros and Conclusions: The Root of All Evil?

The into and conclusion to every essay I have ever written has been the hardest part of the paper. I have the worst time trying to figure out how the engage the reader in my essay. I have had plenty of pointers on how to start off, such as asking a question, starting off with a quote or an interesting fact. Those have helped me through the many essays I have written in high school, but I can't use those tools in my conclusion.
The conclusion of an essay is the hardest for one major reason, teachers can't seem to make up their mind on what its function is. I was originally taught that the conclusion is supposed to summarize the paper, so with that in mind, that is how I wrote my conclusion. I would restate my thesis go over my main points again. As I have progressed to more advanced English classes though, I have found that I am not allowed to summarize in my conclusion. One teacher actually told me that my conclusion "needs to go out into the world." I don't even know what that means. Figuring out how to end my paper on a powerful and rememberable note is hard enough without everyone telling me a different way to do it.