Before this quarter, I took UWP23 and failed the first time. Thus, at the beginning of the course, I was quite unconfident about my writing skills. Furthermore, most of my professors who had seen my paper pointed out that my grammar was poor. Sometimes, I might go off the topic a little bit because of my ignorance of the reading materials, which resulted that my total grade was not so good. However, thanks to the hard efforts I paid this quarter, I learned some new types of paper, like academic research paper and blog that was built in a team group, and several new skills to revise my writing in more effective ways.
In these ten weeks of class, I began to have more and more confidence in writing an academic essay. I learned how to read more effectively for reading assignments in both English class and other courses. The reading strategies, such as first reading for general ideas and then reading again to focus on the main points, help me have a better understanding when I read the course materials. What's more, underlining the main points and taking notes in the margin of the text during reading helps me focus on the reading better. Although the other courses I took this quarter were math and chemistry, there were still a lot of reading materials, and these reading strategies helped me read quicker and understand better.
The first writing assignment, which was paper one, introduced me to the process of writing a blog essay. I had a hard time adjusting to the blog genre since I was only familiar with formal academic writing. After reading sample blogs provided by my instructor, I knew that a blog genre requires less formal language to make the article interesting. Since the audience of this blog is high school students, I realized I needed to use some interesting examples, photos, and titles to attract them. Knowing my audience's preference, I found it easier to write this paper. Thus, understanding the audience's preference before writing contributes to the success of an article. In the future, I may need to write papers for differ...
