Today, I went to visit Baruch’s writing workshop on the 8th floor of the Newman Vertical Campus. To even be admitted into the workshop, you had to have scheduled an appointment prior to attending. At 12:30 PM, the workshop began with a teacher entering the room. Surprisingly, not that many students had attended, only about 8 or 9 students total attended the workshop. After all of our introductions, we moved onto the workshop’s main topic for the day, which was topic sentences for an essay. Our teacher began by writing an opening paragraph onto the board, which we had to analyze. We were initially given a page that contained a few example topic sentences to examine, analyze, and explain. After learning and demonstrating the process of writing, reading, and understanding topic sentences, we went on to analyze an essay written about a George Orwell story called “A Hanging”, which is about a man who is in prison that will soon be hung for unknown reasons. The essay written about it demonstrates the use of topic sentences, with each paragraph stating a part of a reason for why Orwell wrote a story about inhumane prison keepers while noting Orwell himself does not seem to disallow or argue against it, but is seemingly for the idea of cruel punishment and execution. We had to analyze the essay’s use of topic sentence and some of the distinctions used in those topic sentences, such as personification, and invocation of reader sympathy or empathy. Our teacher had given us a great amount of help on the subject matters and because of a small meeting size, we could have individual meetings and conversations. She came around to check on how we were doing frequently to make sure we understood the subject, and allowed for a great atmosphere overall. The workshop itself was very informative and I may go again one day to improve my writing skills.