"Read, Read, Read. Read everything..."

When you sit down to write something there is several different things you can do before jumping into the writing project itself. Freewriting helps to bring random ideas to your head and kind of piece things together. With looping you write until you can't think of anything else to say and than you read everything you just wrote and than start writing again. Listing is just a method of writing down in lists your thoughts and ideas. Some authors like this better than freewriting or looping. Clustering is where you write your topic in the middle of the paper than circle it. Than you branch off from that with ideas. From the ideas you branch off into details and random tid bits of information. Cubing you describe your topic, compare it to something, classify it, analyze it, and argue for or against it. With questioning you ask the basic questions of; who, what, where, when, why, and how. Outlining is where you list and number your ideas in the order your going to write about them. Always write a draft and go back and correct the mistakes later. When writing a draft just focus on writing and worry about grammer and spelling later.

The first story was pretty interesting about how Tanya is born a Latin American but raised in the United States so she can' speak Spanish. I think it's odd that she is embarrassed that she can't speak Spanish because I'm sure there are a lot of others just like her. The next one is about a slave named Fredrick Douglass. At first his mistress taught him to read but after slavery got really bad she became bitter and stopped teaching him things. She eventually believed that slavery and education didn't belong together and did everything in her power to make sure the slaves weren't educated. When he got to his teenage years he began hating his life and slavery and wished for nothing more than death. One day some men gave him advice to run North so he could be free and from that day on he started planning his escape. He learned how to write from boys on the street. He would challenge them saying he could write better than they, and learn from them. After doing that for several years he learned how to write. Another story from this part is about Mike Rose and how he doesn't remember much from his early years in school. He never paid attention in math and wasn't to good in English but he loved chemistry. He liked to read also and he began reading all the time. While reading he stumbled across astronomy and his mother ended up saving money and buying him a telescope.