When I was in my first psychology course in high school, Monday morning, the first day back to school after Thanksgiving break, my teacher pulled out a thick stack of packets of paper and told us we were going to have a test that day--a pop test. Pop was right! Kids started looking around the room, panic on their faces as their eyes began to 'pop' out of their heads! A pop test? A psychology pop test!!! All I could think was, "My L-tryptophan hasn't worn off from the Thanksgiving turkey!"
Luckily for Seth, my best-friend from my neighborhood, the test was not on content learned in class. The test was about us...our skills...our ability to learn in different situations. The test was designed to find out our 'learning style'. Do you know your learning style? Did you ever have a guidance counselor, psychology teacher, or social studies substitute administer a learning style test to you? If you have never taken one, you may want to give it a try. You may learn a lot about yourself, but more importantly, you will learn a lot about how to move information from the world to inside your grey matter--and make it stick.
As learning-styles-online.com states, "by recognizing and understanding your own learning styles, you can use techniques better suited to you [to grasp information and store it in your long-term memory]. This improves the speed and quality of your learning." While you may believe--or have been taught (depending on how old you are)--that there are only three types of learning styles: visual, verbal, and kinesthetic, there are actually more dimensions to learning than just those three avenues.
[If you want to take an online learning styles test, go to this link. If you encounter any problems with it, please let me know. If you find a better site for an online learning styles test, please send me the link.]
What are the different types of learning styles? Even if you have never taken one of these tests, you probably have some clue as to what works best for you.
The Seven Learning StylesI learn best from solitary, visual, verbal and logical lessons. While I pursued a career in the English field, and ultimately became a home-school and university-level instructor, I was urged to go into the math and sciences due to the logic and structure required in those fields. However, there is actually just as much--if not more--structure and logic in the field of English. English has structure in its grammatical make-up (parts of speech), its sentence organization (simple, compound, complex, and compound complex sentences), and in its writing layout (introduction, body, and conclusion paragraph order and flow). I LOVE IT!!! Sorry to yell, but there really is a lot of logic in English: writing and content.
- Visual (spatial):You prefer using pictures, images, and spatial understanding.
- Aural (auditory-musical): You prefer using sound and music.
- Verbal (linguistic): You prefer using words, both in speech and writing.
- Physical (kinesthetic): You prefer using your body, hands and sense of touch.
- Logical (mathematical): You prefer using logic, reasoning and systems.
- Social (interpersonal): You prefer to learn in groups or with other people.
- Solitary (intrapersonal): You prefer to work alone and use self-study. (learning-styles-online.com)
Despite my love of logic, the best way for me to embed learning into my squishy brain is by combining logical and visual learning. I bet many of your are this way, too. Our culture used to be more of a 'doing' group of learners (kinesthetic--hands on learning--due to our industrial careers and the need for our country's infrastructure build-up). With the advent of TV, educational games, and YouTube tutorials, our society is absorbing content more visually, thus producing learners who have grown more accustomed to the visual stimulation requirement for their learning.
Have you figured out where I am going with this? I'm going to provide you with some writing samples...some good, and some in need of work, but nonetheless, they are samples that convey clear writings styles you may encounter in my class or other writing classes: process, cause/effect, narrative, expository, argument, classification, persuasion, literary analysis, and so on. As I find time, I will add more samples to this section. For now, learn more about writing by going through the Writing Examples below:
- Writing Examples
- process,
- cause/effect,
- narrative,
- expository,
- argument,
- classification,
- persuasion,
- literary analysis
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