Narrator: Now listen to two students discussing the announcement.
Female student: I’m happy that they’ve added this class!
Male student: Really? I already have such a heavy load of homework. I don’t want to add even more work.
Female student: Think about it. We have to write papers for nearly every class. Even if it’s just a lab report, we still have to conduct research. In high school, we only learned how to write pretty straightforward papers. The expectations are a lot higher now. It’s easy to get a bad grade just because of poor writing.
Male student: That’s true. I always got good grades in high school, but my first two papers haven’t gotten great marks.
Female student: Plus, it’s taking me a long time to write papers because I don’t have a good idea of exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. I’m not really sure how to develop a thesis statement.
Male student: I know what you mean! I wrote six drafts of my last paper and I still wasn’t completely satisfied with it.
Female student: Well, if we learn how to write good papers now, that will save us a lot of time and effort over the next four years! We’ll have to write a lot of papers—we should learn to do it efficiently.
Male student: You’re right. I’m glad that they added this course, too!
Narrator: The woman expresses her opinion about the new writing class requirement. State her opinion and explain the reasons she gives for holding that opinion.
The female student is, uh, in support of the university’s decision to require first-year students, um, to take a writing class. Um, she… she makes the point that pretty much every class that they’re going to take will require them to write papers. And, uh, the expectations of papers written in high school versus papers written in college is much more high in college, so, um, many students do not have the skill set to be able to write at the college level. Um, so this writing class would be able to give them the tools that they need to… to be able to get the grades that they want. Um, right now, they are taking too… she is taking too long to write a paper because she does not know the right way to do it. Um, if she took a class she would be able to, um, write more efficiently.
The student summarizes all of the reasons the woman supports the new writing requirement. The student could improve her response by training herself to pause briefly at the start of a new sentence to gather her thoughts. Right now, she says “um” at the start of every sentence.