Before I took ENG101 class, I had two kinds of feelings. One was anxiety. I was under pressure that I had to get a good grade to get into a program for my major. The other feeling was expectation. I expected a lot about what I would learn about writing and wanted to improve my skills significantly. In the beginning, I did not used to professor’s style of his teaching. I kind of lost my way of how I write. However, as time has gone to the end of the semester, I realized that I have learned so many things about writing throughout many activities we did and also found out my weaknesses on some basic writing skills as a writer.
I think one of my a few strengths is once I decide my main idea or a topic sentence; I follow my topic in the whole essay. I usually can detect what does not belong to my topic. So, I can use sources usefully to fit my topic.
However, I found my weakness by comparing mine with other classmates’ papers. My biggest problem might be word choice and grammar. Since my first language is not English, I always went through difficulty of correct grammar and word choice everytime I write something. In this class, I also can see how far I am behind compared to American friends. My other weakness is that sometimes I mistakenly summarize articles instead of analyzing them. I do not know why I made mistake on this, but I realize this is my weakness. So, before I move on to ENG102 class, I will consider my problems and try to fix them.
In the ENG101 class, I learned so many things. I learned MLA style of work cited pages. When we use some information from articles, books, or , we need to mention where we use those information from. There are certain methods to make a work cited page. It is important to add work cited page. I also learned level 4 details when we write on body paragraphs. Before this class, I did not know how I develop my writing in body paragraths, but now I have some ideas about developing my ideas through each paragraph. I learned how we write research paper. Research paper was about finding many sources from many different reference materials and use them to support my thesis and argument. I learned various sentence structures as well. Professor showed us on the power point that there can be many different structures that involve a same meaning. To be a better writer, a sentence has to deliver an accurate meaning.
Compare with the beginning of the class, I definitely believe that I have been improved in many things. First, i improved the skill of how I arrange each sentence sequentially in one paragraph and summarize briefly at the end of each paragraph. I feel I also got better of reading skills as I research many sources. Finding a proper source took so much time and need a lot of effort. It needed to be read a lot. At first, I was very slow doing this, but at the end, I read faster and find sources quicker.
There are some class activities that were very helpful. One was a group discussion. After we read some article, book, or movie, we discussed them and shared our opinions each other. Some people had different ideas with same questions. It was a valuable experience for me. Another activity that I liked was blogging on the website. I already mentioned how doing blog was helpful to me. By posting a blog almost every week, I could practice writing frequently. Without concerning seriously about grammar mistakes, I could more focus on ideas, and describing. I also could see other people’s essay. It gave me some ideas when I did not have any ideas how I wrote.
I don’t think there was activity that was less helpful. When I think back, each activity was meaningful and helpful.
No comments:
Post a Comment