Free Essays on Me

High school is a strange time. After three years of trying to develop identity and friends in middle school, students are expected to mature immediately on the first day of ninth grade, but I never did this. I never fully realized in the earlier grades how important high school success, as measured by GPA, would be to my future life, and as a result I am applying to college with seemingly contradictory measures of my ability to perform college-level work. If I had worked and studied hard rather than hanging out with friends and viewing high school as an opportunity to socialize, I would not have to apply to school with a 1300 SAT and a 2.7 GPA. Had I taken my grades in my earlier years seriously, I could have been a college's dream candidate. This year I have made an earnest effort to improve my work ethic. My grade point average is rising and my study habits are improving. However, after performing poorly for three years, my GPA cannot reflect the transformation I underwent at the start of this year. Dedicated to making something of myself, I finally matured and am now trying to lessen the consequences of my past actions. Armed with my new attitude and my understanding of the extreme importance of earning good grades to signal my capacity to work responsibly, I assure you that I will never revert to the student I once was. In retrospect, I believe that it was my inability to choose my classes that resulted in my lack of enthusiasm on the ride to school each morning. I enjoy the freedom to pursue my own interests and anxiously anticipate the ability to choose my own class schedule in college. While I understand that college will be significantly more challenging than high school, I have always found it easier to study for a class that interests me. I am also willing to accept the fact that as long as I am in school, I will be forced to take required courses that I might be less than enthusiastic about. However, with my new goal... Free Essays on Me Free Essays on Me Throughout my life I have been faced with many obstacles in which, luckily, I have overcome. Unfortunately though, many of those obstacles I created myself. When kids enter high school, they make decisions as freshman that foreshadow the rest of their high school career. Sadly, I picked the wrong path to follow. This choice led me to a long and hard couple years. I was getting in trouble in school, getting in trouble at home, and even getting in trouble with the law. Until one day I was expelled from school. I left my friends, my teachers, my work and I went to a brand new environment. This is when I began to see that I needed to change. In the first couple months of my freshman year I had to deal with the death of my grandmother. We had a very close relationship. I remember when I was little I used to sit on her lap as we played games or read a book. Because her death was never fully explained to me, I began to drift away from my family. I started to look for comfort in the new friends I was making. This was one of the first mistakes I made. My new friends were in to partying and drugs. In order to keep them my friends I felt I had to keep up, which meant partying along with them. So of course, my grades began to fall and I started to become out of control. Eventually my behavior started to get so bad that it was causing problems in my home. I would walk in the front door and hear my parents fighting over how they were going to deal with me. The screaming would not stop and with in a couple minutes I would be part of it. Today I know that I almost caused my parents to get a divorce. With my partying, low grades, and all out disrespect I was driving my parents insane and they were taking it out on each other. As Ientered my sophomore year everything was still the same. I had been suspended plenty of times, arrested, put on probation, and practically anything that was bad- Idid. Then came junior year. This is when Ifound out my... Free Essays on Me High school is a strange time. After three years of trying to develop identity and friends in middle school, students are expected to mature immediately on the first day of ninth grade, but I never did this. I never fully realized in the earlier grades how important high school success, as measured by GPA, would be to my future life, and as a result I am applying to college with seemingly contradictory measures of my ability to perform college-level work. If I had worked and studied hard rather than hanging out with friends and viewing high school as an opportunity to socialize, I would not have to apply to school with a 1300 SAT and a 2.7 GPA. Had I taken my grades in my earlier years seriously, I could have been a college's dream candidate. This year I have made an earnest effort to improve my work ethic. My grade point average is rising and my study habits are improving. However, after performing poorly for three years, my GPA cannot reflect the transformation I underwent at the start of this year. Dedicated to making something of myself, I finally matured and am now trying to lessen the consequences of my past actions. Armed with my new attitude and my understanding of the extreme importance of earning good grades to signal my capacity to work responsibly, I assure you that I will never revert to the student I once was. In retrospect, I believe that it was my inability to choose my classes that resulted in my lack of enthusiasm on the ride to school each morning. I enjoy the freedom to pursue my own interests and anxiously anticipate the ability to choose my own class schedule in college. While I understand that college will be significantly more challenging than high school, I have always found it easier to study for a class that interests me. I am also willing to accept the fact that as long as I am in school, I will be forced to take required courses that I might be less than enthusiastic about. However, with my new goal...

Examples of Informalization in English

Examples of Informalization in English In linguistics, informalization is the incorporation of aspects of intimate, personal discourse (such as colloquial language) into public forms of spoken and written communication  is called informalization. Its also called demotization. Conversationalization is a key aspect of the more general process of informalization, though the two terms are sometimes treated as synonyms. Some linguists (most notably discourse analyst Norman Fairclough) use the expression border crossing to describe what they perceive as the development in post-industrialized societies of a complex range of new social relationships, with behavior (including linguistic behaviour) . . . changing as a result (Sharon Goodman, Redesigning English, 1996). Informalization is a prime example of this transformation. Fairclough further describes informalization as such: The engineering of informality, friendship, and even intimacy entails a crossing of borders between the public and the private, the commercial and the domestic, which is partly constituted by a simulation of the discursive practices of everyday life, conversational discourse. (Norman Fairclough, Border Crossings: Discourse and Social Change in Contemporary Societies. Change and Language, ed. by H. Coleman and L. Cameron. Multilingual Matters, 1996) Characteristics of Informalization Linguistically, [informalization involves] shortened terms of address, contractions of negatives and auxiliary verbs, the use of active rather than passive sentence constructions, colloquial language and slang. It can also involve the adoption of regional accents (as opposed to say Standard English) or increased amounts of self-disclosure of private feelings in public contexts (e.g. it can be found in talk shows or in the workplace). (Paul Baker and Sibonile Ellece, Key Terms in Discourse Analysis. Continuum, 2011) Informalization and Marketization Is the English language becoming increasingly informal? The argument put forward by some linguists (such as Fairclough) is that the boundaries between language forms traditionally reserved for intimate relationships and those reserved for more formal situations are becoming blurred. . . . In many contexts, . . . the public and professional sphere is said to becoming infused with private discourse. . . . If the processes of informalization and marketization are indeed becoming increasingly widespread, then this implies that there is a requirement for English speakers generally not only to deal with, and respond to, this increasingly marketized and informal English, but also to become involved in the process. For example, people may feel that they need to use English in new ways to sell themselves in order to gain employment. Or they may need to learn new linguistic strategies to keep the jobs they already haveto talk to the public, for instance. In other words, they have to become producers of promotional texts. This can have consequences for the ways in which people see themselves.(Sharon Goodman, Market Forces Speak English. Redesigning English: New Texts, New Identities. Routledge, 1996) The Engineering of Informality in Conversationalization and Personalization [Norman] Fairclough suggests that the engineering of informality (1996) has two overlapping strands: conversationalization and personalization. Conversationalizationas the term impliesinvolves the spread into the public domain of linguistic features generally associated with conversation. It is usually associated with personalization: the construction of a personal relationship between the producers and receivers of public discourse. Fairclough is ambivalent toward informalization. On the positive side, it might be viewed as part of the process of cultural democratization, an opening up of the elite and exclusive traditions of the public domain to discursive practices which we can all attain (1995: 138). To counterbalance this positive reading of informalization, Fairclough points out that the textual manifestation of personality in a public, mass media text must always be artificial. He claims that this sort of synthetic personalization only simulates solidarity, and is a strategy o f containment hiding coercion and manipulation under a veneer of equality. (Michael Pearce, The Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies. Routledge, 2007) Media Language Informalization and colloquialization have been well documented in the language of the media. In news reportage, for example, the past three decades have seen a definite trend away from the cool distancing of traditional written style and towards a kind of spontaneous directness which (though often contrived) is clearly supposed to inject into journalistic discourse some of the immediacy of oral communication. Such developments have been quantified in textual analysis; for instance, a recent corpus-based study of editorials in the British quality press in the twentieth century (Westin 2002) shows informalization as a trend persisting through the twentieth century, and accelerating towards its end. (Geoffrey Leech, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, and Nicholas Smith, Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge University Press, 2010)In an experimental study, Sanders and Redeker (1993) found that readers appreciated news texts with inserted free indirect thoughts as m ore lively and suspenseful than text without such elements, but at the same time evaluated them as less suitable for the news text genre (Sanders and Redeker 1993). . . . Pearce (2005) points out that public discourse, such as news texts and political texts, is influenced by a general trend towards informalization. Characteristics include, in Pearces view, personalization and conversationalization; linguistic markers of these concepts have become more frequent in news texts over the last fifty years (Vis, Sanders Spooren, 2009). (Josà © Sanders, Intertwined Voices: Journalists Modes of Representing Source Information in Journalistic Subgenres. Textual Choices in Discourse: A View from Cognitive Linguistics, ed. by Barbara Dancygier, Josà © Sanders, Lieven Vandelanotte. John Benjamins, 2012)