Hello, world.

Team Members

Will Ferguson
What's up? I'm Will Ferguson; a senior at UNC. I will graduate during the summer of the current year. I'm majoring in Peace, War & Defense and want to work for the Intelligence Community after graduation. I have studied abroad in Russia for a summer session and hope to travel back to Russia and Eastern Europe soon. I transferred from North Carolina State University after my sophomore year and was a member of the club baseball team. I enjoy traveling, sports and being with friends and family.

Gabrielle Galloway
Hey, I'm Gabrielle Galloway. I'm a freshman attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I am majoring in Pharmacy and minoring in Spanish. Currently, I'm a member of the Black Student Movement and also play for an intramural basketball team. As a freshman, I am trying to adapt to the new changes and the many different curricula of my teachers. In the future, I hope to travel abroad to Spain and to other Hispanic countries.

Jeff Wright
What's up everybody. My name is Jeff Wright and I'm a sophomore, majoring in biology, from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Last year, I attended Villanova University before transferring to UNC. As is the case with the other group members, this is my second semester taking an English class at UNC. My favorite activities are working out and supporting Carolina basketball. My favorite sports teams are the Boston Red Sox and the New England Patriots and I enjoy good parties as well as hanging out with friends. Upon graduation, I want to go to medical school at UNC. My goal is to become a pediatrician because I really enjoy working with children. At home I work as an after school and summer camp counselor at the YMCA. Working at the Y has been one of the best experiences of my life and I cannot imagine having any other summer job. Last semester I took English 101, an introductory English course which emphasizes writing. My class wrote three major papers last semester, reflecting three different styles of writing. The first was a newspaper article in response to a presidential speech, the second paper was based on a specific aspect of our society in the future, and the third paper was an analysis of the film Solaris.


Melissa Cochran
Hello, hello. My name is Melissa Cochran and I am in my first year at Carolina. For the most part, I have enjoyed the first semester. I like shopping, going out, and meeting new people. I am from Winston-Salem, NC, but originally from Macon, GA. I have an older brother that graduated from UNC last spring and he is the primary reason that I became interested in the university. I believe that the best things about college are meeting new people as well as the new opportunities that UNC offers both socially and educationally.


Dana Brand
Hello everybody! My name is Dana Brand and I am a freshman at Carolina and can’t wait until baseball season starts. I am undecided on my major simply because I want to do too much with my life. I like to read, write, and watch old movies and have two goals in my life: to win an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize. Elementary writing classes kill my soul, but I will do my best to produce posts that are at least entertaining. I enjoy, above all else, baseball, history, literature, film, and theater. If you ask me, I would label myself as a nerd. If I were more into hard science I would build a time machine so that I could meet Cary Grant. Obviously, I'm not a very practical person.

Credibility as bloggers

All students attend UNC, giving them at least an initial credibility as blog authors. Because we have yet to finish an assignment, our credibility with our audience will come as our blog and the semester progress. Most of the authors are freshmen so strict writing styles have not yet been formulated. One of the group members is a journalism major so a blog will allow her to use her talents. Everyone else is upbeat about creating a blog because it lacks the dullness of continually writing papers in one particular style. Here we are allowed to be as creative as we want to be and fashion the blog to our liking.

In terms of potential styles, having a sophomore and a senior in the group makes it more versatile because these two members have had experience writing in certain techniques, especially the senior. Our rhetorical style will basically remain the same but there will probably be an obvious difference among the writers, although all styles will be directed at the high school level.


Purpose and Direction of Our Blog

Our blog is directed at upperclassmen high school students who are considering UNC or any other major university. Therefore, our blog will need to accomplish a number of goals and be presented in a way that is both appealing to these students as well as maintain an organized characteristic that will give legitimacy to the blog. The blog will maintain a relaxed theme in that the vocabulary used will reflect that of a high school senior rather than a level that would be appropriate for an upper level, university research paper. At times the blog may seem to be more advanced that what an average high-schooler may be ready for, but we feel that this blog is directed at above average, competitive students. In any case, this will not be an excuse to dumb down the blog, but will just be another writing style, which in itself, will reflect the goals of English 102.

There are a number of goals that we want to achieve with this blog. One is to simply introduce high school upperclassmen to freshman English. Entering college is a difficult experience for some, so helping seniors make the transition in any way possible is a service to them. Also, the blog can be a place where our audience can express their feelings towards the material we post. This will help them formulate opinions on an array of material, something they will have to do throughout college. The goals of our blog will surely expand as we progress through the semester, as is the natural tendency of a blog.

As a blog is a more personal means of presenting information, our blog will obviously carry some occasional biases, however our objective is not to infuse the blog with too much bias, but with neutrality given the wide range of feelings about certain issues that come from a broad audience such as high school students.

To conclude with the introductory post, we will try link our blog entries to the overall subject/theme that writing is a dynamic art and that each individual may approach subject matter with different perspectives and ideas. The assignments for this class are based around the assumption that assumptions do not necessarily hold true in different fields of writing. For example, the first unit deals with testing the assumption that scientific writing is set in stone. Through the different perspectives of our blog’s authors, we will challenge this assumption and will do the same for the following units. While we are working as a unit, individual styles will certainly fill our blog because it is, in fact, a work compiled from individual efforts. We want to show our audience, who may be nervous about the assumption that college students must write a particular way, that different approaches may be used in writing about the same material. As we all know, and as we want to illustrate to those students striving for a spot at top universities, the best way to approach a writing assignment is with an open mind and a lot of creativity.