Kyle

=English 103=

Me, Myself, and I
My name is Kyle Pope, I am from South Bend, IN. I went to Saint Joseph's High School and I played football and I was a swimmer in my four years there. My senior year I was a Captain for both sports. I have a pretty big family, I am the fourth child of five and I have three nieces and nephews with another niece that is due to be born in November. I have two summer jobs, I am a lifeguard at the community pool in my neighborhood and I am on a River Rescue Team on a white water rafting course called the East Race in South Bend.

Kyle as a Writer
Kyle, like most of us, has plenty of experience writing for school. Despite this experience he still sees writing as his weakness. He has problems in the formation of his writing. He often finds organizing his thoughts becomes difficult when working on assignments. Structure is the main issue in Kyle's formal writing, and even in note taking. Thoughts become jumbled and out of place. Although Kyle has a problem with some of his formal writing, he loves informal writing. This informal writing is anything from making lists, planning out things, Facebook, and texting.

-Tyler Bell

__Memoir First Draft__
Kyle Pope English 103 Hartman September 8, 2010

Ever since I was nine years old, football has been the defining aspect of my life. I wait patiently every year for the temperature to get cooler and the leaves on the trees to turn different colors, and that is when I can feel that it is football season. Now, why only since I was nine years old? When I turned nine I was finally able to play football on my grade school football team, I was finally able to be a part of the Crusader football tradition. A tradition that I watched my brothers and my cousins go through as they began playing football, and it was finally my own chance to play with a real helmet and pads on. However, playing football for my grade school team was never my ultimate goal.

The real tradition in my family was to play football as a St. Joe Indian. South Bend Saint Joseph’s high school was the school that almost everyone in my entire family attended for their high school years. Not only has almost everyone in my family attended St. Joe for high school, but we have all been a part of the football program there. Even the girls in my family have been a part of the program, whether they were a trainer for the team, a cheerleader, or a cheerleading coach.

Playing football for St. Joe was always the number one thing on my wish list, and in the fall of 2006 my greatest wish was finally becoming true. I finally was able to put on my own Columbia blue and white uniform and my own helmet with the spear on it for my first game as an Indian football player. Not only was I just able to put on my uniform and strap on my helmet, but I had fought my way through two grueling weeks of my very first two-a-day practices to earn a starting position on offense, defense, and special teams. I had never played defense when I played football in grade school, I now had the opportunity to play on both sides of the ball. Being a player for St. Joe was the greatest feeling I had ever felt up to that point. My entire family came out to watch me in my first game as a freshman, and I played my heart out. I did not want to let them down. I wanted to show everyone that I could be an elite player for the St. Joe program, I wanted to leave my mark on St. Joe football, a long-lived tradition in which players do not play for themselves, but for the man next to him.

This conveys the importance of playing football for St. Joe and the meaning of your first game. But this is mostly set up with little story--it's more like a summary of a story than the story itself. You need some specific episodes with concrete detail to put the readers into the scene. --msh

__Statement of Purpose__
To my friends Kody and Mike at Purdue University about the problems that I have with the dining system at Ball State
 * Audience**: College Students
 * Purpose**: To explain my opinion about why I do not like the way that the Ball State dining system is set up
 * Response**: I would like people to understand why the dining system at Ball State is not that great when it comes to things like meal usage, missed meals, meal times, and prices, etc.

MSH: This sounds good, but why write to friends at Purdue about the dining system here? Would it be better to address someone connected to the dining system or Ball State?

__Letter First Draft__
Kyle Pope Dr. Hartman English 103 10/2/2010

Ball State Dining Department,

I would like for it to be brought to your attention that I have a couple of complaints about the way that the dining system here at Ball State University is set up. Now, I would like for you to understand that I am not complaining about the quality of the food; the quality of the food is actually very good in my mind. I just have a couple of concerns about the way the dining system works and is set up.

First of all, I personally think that there are some flaws in the way that the student meal plans work. For example, if a student is on the twenty-one meal plan and they miss a meal they lose $7.55. The question that everyone wonders about is “Where does that money go?” We as students do not even get the chance for that money for our meal to roll over into the upcoming week, and as college students we would like to have that chance since we are paying so much to be able to attend this school and for room and board and for our dining meals. Another flaw about the dining system is the usage of meals during meal periods. Students are only allowed to use one meal for each period. The problem with this is that the time that each period starts and ends at certain times during the day that, for some students, are not efficient times. For example, the breakfast time period ends at 10:30 A.M., now if a student goes to eat at 10:39 A.M. he or she is technically eating his or her meal for the lunch period. That means that he or she cannot eat another meal until 4:30 P.M. The flaw of this part of the system is that the time periods for meal usage are not set up very well and are not always good times for students to be able to use their meal. For lunch and dinner, students are given $7.55 to use for their meal. That is not a bad allowance considering the food is not too expensive. However, for breakfast students are only given $4.20. That is not very much at all. Students are able to use that on the buffet but what if he or she does not have time to go to the buffet and has to just pick something up from the dining room real quick. $4.20 will get you a drink and maybe a hot pocket or a small bowl of cereal. That is not very much. I think that students should be allowed even just a little bit more money for breakfast so that they are able to get more that just two small items. Peer Commentary p.122 The occaison of his letter is to get Btate State to realize the meal plan system should be changed. There isn't a specific place that stands out to me where the purpose is, perhaps putting more information with a thesis in the opening paragraph would be a good place for this. Writing about more of substitutions or different ways the way you believe the meal plans should work would be very effective. You definitely make it aware you are a student speaking.

Research Paper Draft
Kyle Pope English 103 Dr. Hartman 10/29/2010

Video Game Violence

The creation of violent video games has increased tremendously over the past ten to fifteen years. From my own personal experience, games such as Resident Evil, the Grand Theft Auto Series, True Crime: New York City, 50 Cent: Bulletproof have been very violent in ways that are sometimes unimaginable in reality. For example, in the beginning of Resident Evil 4 it is likely for the player to find the dead body of a young woman pinned on a wall by a pitchfork that is impaled through her face. For another example severe violence, in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the player is associated with the “Grove Street” gang and runs around reeking havoc in the city of San Andreas committing felonies such as theft and murder. To regain health, the player visits prostitutes and then kills them to recover the money that he just paid them. It is true that violence in video games can be very overboard but that is why video games have a rating system similar to the rating system used to rate Movies. Games such as these listed above all have the rating of “M” for Mature. This means that stores will not sell games like these to kids that are under the age of seventeen, but that does not mean that they can control who plays the games after they are purchased because of the fact that older siblings will sometimes share games rated “M” for Mature, that they bought legally from a game store because they are seventeen of older, with younger siblings that sometimes not quite mature enough to handle what goes on as the game progresses. I, myself, have older siblings that would play violent video games and I will admit that I played the games also, at a very young age. However, my older siblings took into consideration that I was young and needed to be taught what was going on in the game and that whatever happens in the game is not real and is a crime in real life. I was educated that “a game is only a game” and that it is wrong if an act like that is committed in real life. Now, even I though I was educated on what happens in violent games, kids whose older siblings do not tell them that “a game is only a game” should still be able to determine that the violence in games cannot be done in real life, because of the fact that been through the age of reason for quite some time. Most kids should be able to determine for themselves the difference between right and wrong even as they go through standard parenting when they are young.


 * 1) "Violent Video Games and Young People." //Harvard Mental Health Letter// 27.4 (2010): 1-3. //Academic Search Premier//. EBSCO. Web. 25 Oct. 2010.
 * 2) “Violent Media is Good”