E. Shelley Reid’s essay provides ten ways college students should think about how they should be writing. A lot of these ideas are similar to each other, yet they can be beneficial to college students when writing a paper. Reid uses a lot of specific examples and analogies to get her ideas across that make these ten points easier to understand. She covers a lot of topics about writing that students tend to worry about and describes them in a manner that I never thought about. For example, Reid brings up repetition of the main point in an essay and the idea of keeping readers engaged and focused. She does this with the analogy of a driver telling their friends in the car about a pink house, either right as the car passes it or two miles before it comes up. The argument here is that it is important for writers to keep the readers’ attention throughout by occasionally bringing up the main message of the essay and being specific so that the audience is not lost.
Reid also discusses primary and secondary audiences, balancing arguments and examples, paragraph lengths and annotations. These are all great points to consider when writing. These ten points definitely make me think about how much different writing in college is from writing in high school and earlier. Before college, there were so many rules that students needed to follow, and though some of these rules apply in college, there are certain spots of leeway when writing for a college assignment. Reid’s list is overall helpful, though not all of the points may stick out to any one college writer.
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