Jennifer's English Blog

I always worry about what other may think about me. This really affects me leading to me becoming really nervous and have a hard time holding a conversation. When presenting memorizing scripts feels too robotic but speaking off the fly is a no go since my brain tends to blank out when I’m in front of people. By the end I’m panicking and thinking, oh god how bad did it do? It was a disaster, I stuttered, accidentally repeated myself a bit, and was so nervous my tone sounded flat that I’m sure nobody paid attention. All week we’ve been learning rhetorical devices, I think I did okay on the exercises so far, struggled a bit coming up with phrases though. 14 October 2026

Whenever we would go to birthdays for relatives or saw someone she knew my mother would spend a lot of time talking to people for a long. Imagine getting ready to leave but the second you get to the door someone talks to her so we’re there waiting another 20 minutes for her to finish if we don’t hurry her up. During one of my cousin’s birthday I was passing the time by scrolling through my phone, I even played some uno with the other children in the house, it was overall a simple birthday party in their house. We arrived somewhere in the evening and were still there late into the night, at that point I was tired and just wanted to get back home to my own bed and call quits for the day. But everytime I asked my mother when we were leaving she would lightly brush me off with later or soon and continued talking to the other, so at one point I just leaned against her and whined how I was gonna be 6 feet under-ground by the time we finally left. In class today we talked about some rhetori...

​ I found clustering as a brainstorming strategy to be very useful. It helps my thought to go from broad ideas to more specific ideas that would fit into the prompt. I do believe I would use this strategy when planning on my easy, it would help sort through the possible ideas. The Ap Lang exam is going to be difficult so this would help me organize my thoughts. Today we used the clustering strategy with a prompt of job, we discussed what would meet the requirements. September 25, 2026

​Thinking back to how I talk is a bit embarrassing. The phrase I use the most is “for heaven’s sake”. Typically I use when I’m annoyed and in a sarcastic tone. I would use it because at some point I started noticing that because I was so used to being in an environment where cursing was casual that I would use it often. Given that my family is religious I wanted to limit that by using other phrases when speaking, small progress is that I don’t say it out loud much however in my mind it’s still a bit of an issue. We did vocabulary, it wasn’t particularly hard however we did tend to overthink options, had to ask around what others’ got to check if I was wrong before I even consider submitting my work.

​ I unfortunately have a bad habit of catastrophizing. I can’t bring myself to do anything without thinking of how things can go wrong. Fear for my safety and discomfort like trying to push against some invisible barrier but flashes of terrifying incidents that are so rare because there are precautions. To help overcome this I try to be impulsive with decision, the more terrified I become and want to back out. While I do attempt to push myself out of my comfort zone, I don’t think I’m ready to approach it without company to ease my worries a bit. I would say today’s class was uneventful, picture day and lunch during this class period probably threw off the day’s plan, so we really didn’t do much aside from being given the time to work on our blogs.

​I was never the best at writing so I did struggle when we were doing one in class. The area I struggle most when writing is the evidence. Finding something that would fit or writing about something in specific details. I don’t know how to go into details about scenarios that fit but aren’t strong enough to connect with the audience. My mind goes blank and I forget that it’s not just my experience I can rely on. That reliable sources, no matter how upsetting it is that social media doesn’t count given that’s how most find things out, commonly used like the news or past incidents with similar outcomes to what I’m looking for. In class I believe we had just taken some notes that day, what was allowed to be used in the writing such as matter of speech and credible sources.