So far i've been to two different highschools and my first had a very structured english department with very strict guidelines for writing. my teacher, Mr. Hines, was awesome. He made his class very fun and individualized his course to the needs to each student, becasue he knew that we all learned differently. As for research papers, they were pretty straight forward. We would read a couple books, look up some stuff on the internet, and then organize all the information we needed by highlighting and book marking pages. Then we would come up with a thesis, arguing a certain point, state it in our intro paragraph and support it with three or more supporting paragraphs. Generally we would think of three topic sentences to start our three supporting paragraphs. We were taugh to use a lot of creative detail and to show the reader rather than tell them different things such as charicter details, details of setting, ect. I throughly enjoied his class. He made us all feel very intelligent and important and helped with any problems we had, weather they were with reading, writing, or with fellow classmates. My second highschool english class focused mostly on creative writing and poetery. We did very informal writing, but also focused mostly on the creative aspect as well as sentence flow. The majority of our research papers were in science and history class and were long and dreary and mostly based on the same style of writing as my previous highschool. We did a lot of poetery such as haikus, lymrics, couplets, carpe diem poems, parodic poems, and we also worked on the creative and "reader-hooking" parts of our writing skills. it was all very informal. In history we had to wirte papers that showed that we had learned the material well enough to the point where we could teach it to someone else, same with science. we wrote papers on the civil war, the watergate scandal, dirt, oil, and im sure i did use plenty of rhetoric devices, but writing this blog with constricted time right before lunch, i cant really think of them off the top of my head. i know this blog is a little short, and i appologize for that, but im a bit rushed for time. the next one will be extra long and more interesting and to the point. i'm sorry, bye bye. the end.