Did you write papers in high school? [Added: Special Accommodations?]

donbosco

donbosco

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A senior thesis for example?

Did you enter college knowing how to create a footnote citation? A bibliographical citation? Did you know that newspaper and book titles should be italicized and book chapters and articles are placed inside of quotation marks? Did you know that punctuation belongs inside of a quotation some 99.9% of the time?

I graduated from a pretty lowly-rated rural North Carolina high school and I knew those things but that was back in 1976. I also wrote several papers including a senior thesis (IIRC it was 25 pages long and included footnotes and a bibliography).

Note that I am approaching a rant but then that usually happens during exam and final grading time.
 
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Yes, I did. I, too, went to a crappy rural NC 2A HS, but my junior and senior years’ English teacher was old school before old school became cool. She was a stickler for grammar and the value of literacy.

Although thoroughly unpleasant in other ways, she was a gem.
 
Yes I did. We were taught to follow MLA style. In addition to a thesis, we wrote every Friday in my AP English class both Junior and Senior year l. That assignment was typically an analysis of a poem, article or other short writing passage and completely transformed my writing abilities.
 
I wrote some papers but no senior thesis. Went to high school in NC. Longest was 8-10 pages I think.
But school wasn’t a priority for me. I used my 7th grade science fair project I found in the article for my senior science fair project. Got a B or C on it. Laughed my ass off about that, I hated and still hate “projects”. Should the period be inside the quotations?
 
My AP English classes in 11th and 12th grade required like 8 pretty rigorous papers each.

AP US History required an absurd number of essays, but they weren’t as dense or rigorously graded. Probably wrote at least 30 for that class.
 
We didn't have a senior thesis.

I learned to write (mostly correctly) due to AP classes, even though I never took AP English.

Also, since it was included in the OP, I disagree that punctuation should be inside the quotation marks and so I intentionally flout that rule the vast majority of the time. It's my own personal rebellion against the overly burdensome strictures of American grammar. (Like a lot of things when it comes to speech/grammar, I think the Brits have the better idea here.)
 
I went to a high school that was all about preparing us for college so we wrote a decent number of papers. No senior thesis though. I and most of the folks I went to high school with thought high school was much more rigorous than college.
 
Icky Mettle said:
I went to a high school that was all about preparing us for college so we wrote a decent number of papers. No senior thesis though. I and most of the folks I went to high school with thought high school was much more rigorous than college.
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Where did you go to HS and college?

College was a lot tougher than HS for me.
 
I didn’t have a senior thesis but wrote a ton in HS. Most of my electives were history classes so that accounted for most of them.

I used to write well, but have lost those skills to the scourge of time and SMS/Slack communication.
 
SnoopRob said:
Where did you go to HS and college?

College was a lot tougher than HS for me.
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Some of the entry level STEM classes at UNC felt very cutthroat to me. Like they weren’t necessarily a huge step up conceptually compared to HS, but the tests and grading standards were a tough adjustment.

HS was tougher in the sense that I never felt like I had enough time to balance homework with sports/extracurriculars.
 
SnoopRob said:
Where did you go to HS and college?

College was a lot tougher than HS for me.
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I went to Charlotte Country Day for high school. Guilford College for undergrad. I can tell you that most of the folks I know who went to my high school and went on to UNC thought college was easier (granted, most of those who went to UNC were among the top 20 students in the class). My friends who went to public school in Charlotte and went on to UNC thought college was harder. I went to public school in Charlotte until 8th grade and I was definitely behind a good chunk of my class when I started at Country Day.

The one college that a number of people I went to high school with thought was more challenging, at least as freshmen, was Davidson.
 
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I went to a large HS in upstate SC. We wrote a few term papers and a lot of essays. As I recall, the rule was 3 misspellings, one comma splice or one run-on sentence resulted in an F. Oh, yes, we knew footnotes and bibliographies.

I majored in engineering, so not many term papers until my thesis in grad school.
 
Icky Mettle said:
I went to Charlotte Country Day for high school. Guilford College for undergrad. I can tell you that most of the folks I know who went to my high school and went on to UNC thought college was easier. My friends who went to public school in Charlotte and went on to UNC thought college was harder. I went to public school in Charlotte until 8th grade and I was definitely behind a good chunk of my class when I started at Country Day.

The one college that a number of people I went to high school with thought was more challenging, at least as freshmen, was Davidson.
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I went to public HS in a rural NC county and didn't have to regularly study in any real capacity to get As.

Carolina was definitely a lot harder for me than HS. 🤷‍♂️
 
SnoopRob said:
I went to public HS in a rural NC county and didn't have to regularly study in any real capacity to get As.

Carolina was definitely a lot harder for me than HS. 🤷‍♂️
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I studied a lot in HS and got decent grades overall, but not quite good enough to get into Carolina. I did the bare minimum in college and was a Dean’s List student. Then there was law school….
 
Icky Mettle said:
I studied a lot in HS and got decent grades overall, but not quite good enough to get into Carolina. I did the bare minimum in college and was a Dean’s List student. Then there was law school….
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That's such a different HS experience than I had, as I got one non-A (a B+ missing an A- by one point as a freshman) in HS and I doubt I studied/did homework outside of school more than 5 hours a week, on average (outside of AP classes, which we only offered a few).

But when I got to Carolina I struggled hard initially as I had no idea how to really study and then became a very good student once I adjusted, but I certainly put in a lot more effort in college.
 
Back in the day I wrote many HS papers and papers at UNC.

My HS English teacher taught us how to write a paper which served me well at UNC.

1 ) Tell the reader what you are going to tell them, then
2 ) Tell them what you are telling them, then
3 ) Tell them what you told them

the secret to writing a perfect paper/essay...
 
In high school when writing papers, I always had "Warriner's English Grammar and Composition," 1965 edition by my side. I inherited it from my older brother and even wrote my name in the book as closely mimicking the way my brother did as I could. I also had a copy of Strunk & White's "The Elements of Style," that I frequently consulted. I even made Xerox copies of Chapter 10, Glossery of Usage, from Warriner's book that I stapled to the back cover of "The Elements of Style." While I am retired, I have a desk in my home and both these books are within arm's reach of my where I sit when writing something on my computer.
 
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