My Academic Literacy Improvement

Like transforming from a caterpillar to a butterfly, my writing style transformed from something mediocre to something quite exceptional. In high school, even when I took advanced placement English and Literature courses, I was never good at writing. My writing would lack structure, reasoning, syntax, and a well-defined thesis statement. My inadequate grades on writing assignments lowered my self-esteem, so I assumed I would never enjoy writing papers because I believed I could never improve. However, since attending a university my writing style has improved far beyond my expectation. My EN 101 course enhanced my understanding of the different ways I could approach my writing. Also, it enhanced my comprehension of outlines to complete assignments. Investing quality time into my writing made a substantial difference because I became a stronger writer. Through the late nights, constant revisions, and agonizing head traumas, I learned that my writing is truly spectacular whenever I incorporate well-defined thesis statements, provide sufficient supporting evidence, and maintain a clear focus in my assignments.

The art of writing is a complex and difficult process. Proper writing requires careful planning, revision, and proofreading. Throughout the past semester, the quality of my writing has evolved significantly. At first, I struggled with the separation of different types of paragraphs, and I found writing them laborious. Constant practice, however, has eliminated many of my original difficulties, and helped to inspire confidence in my skills. As a collegiate writer, my strength lies in my clear understanding of the fundamentals of writing, while my primary weakness is proofreading my own work.

With an improvement in writing, there also comes an improvement in reading. The first reading assigned to us, “The Banking Concept of Education” by Paulo Freire, was one of the more difficult pieces of writing I had been asked to analyze throughout my career as a student. This course has provided me with the resources and skills to break apart readings piece by piece and understand them as well as apply them to my own life. I slowly became a better reader, finally realizing the use of annotations and the importance of re-reading texts until you can understand them. A better understanding of the readings gave me the ability to produce essays that are well developed

I immensely struggled when writing. Taking my scrambled thoughts and uncoordinated analysis and converting it into clean and understandable words on a page was arduous. I could not express my thoughts in proper academic format. I understood the importance of writing to every subject. It was essential that I learn to condense my ideas and feeling into coherent written word. After much debate, I decided that the best way to improve my writing skills was to take an advanced English course.

After this semester of English 102, at Bristol Community College I feel that I have gained the skill to articulate what I want to convey to the reader in many ways. I don’t just look at grammatical error, but instead I look for ways to make my sentences more effective and concise. Nevertheless, I hope that this strategy will continue to help me improve my writing even further on in the future.

Chin, Beverly Ann (2000). The role of grammar in improving student’s writing. Retrieved from http://www.uwplatt.edu/~ciesield/graminwriting.htm

Literacy, whether it is reading, writing, or listening, can mean many different things to people. Each form can impact everyone immensely. In 2016 I had a literacy encounter that made a lasting impact on me. That summer I began babysitting John, a precious five-year-old boy, for the sole purpose of building up my bank account. Since both of John’s parents worked long hours at the hospital, John did not get to spend as much quality time with them as he or they would have liked. I felt badly for John, so I made it my goal that the time I spent with him would be meaningful and memorable.

The six course goals of this English 109W course are to Engage in writing as a process that includes planning, revision, and editing based on feedback from peers and instructors; Critically read and analyze academic texts; Understand, identify, and analyze the rhetorical situations of academic texts, including their contexts, audiences, purposes and personas; Understand, identify, and analyze the rhetorical situations of academic texts, which may include genre, format, evidence, citation, style and organization; Develop an awareness of and preparedness for the writing they will do through their majors through research, exploration, and or practice of the discourse community’s conventions; and Engage in formal and informal writing that analyzes and critically reflects on their major’s writing conventions and their own writing practices and choices. I perceive that I have achieved all the goals for this course through the various drafts I composed, polished papers I produced, and the supplemental work that I have selected to include enclosed within my portfolio.

In L. Lennie Irvin’s “What Is ‘Academic’ Writing?” Irvin presents the reader’s with the necessary skills to probably compose a colligate level paper. Doing this, Irvin exposes common myths of writing. These myths include that writing is simply a trait that cannot be improved. He explains by stating if one wishes to improve their writing skills they must think about the way they present an idea rather than fretting about the grammar. Irvin also clarifies terms such as analyze and argument. While these are just some of the major points, Irvin thoroughly explains to students new to college how to compose a collegiate level essay.

As Goshgarian states in Exploring Language, “Most college writing is an exercise in persuasion – an attempt to influence reader’s attitudes about the subject matter” (90). In order to effectively persuade our audience, we must not only write skillfully, but also be able to send a clear, interesting, and concise message. In chapter two of the above mentioned book, Goshgarian provides various articles with insights on how to improve our writing. I found “Beware the Trap of Bore-geous Writing”, by Ayelet Waldman; “The Case for Short Words”, by Richard Lederer; and “Saying is Believing”, by Patricia O’ Conner very interesting as they all highlight the importance of writing clearly and provide valuable advice on how to do it better. However, I personally found “Saying is Believing”, by Patricia O’Conner, to be the most helpful resource due to the reasons I intend to explain in this essay.

Within English 219, we have already learned a vital set of writing skills, that will allow for the improvement of essays, and summaries that must be written for future assessments. Some of these skills that would be relevant for achieving general writing improvement could be ideas such as thesis development, structuring and planning, or more specific examples when actually fleshing out the essay such as elements of grammar and style. Thesis development which is crucial so that ideas can be fully explained and related back to a point which can be interpreted as an overarching theme for the entire paper, and allows the reader to interpret the topic of not only the essay but of each paragraph. Taking a step back we looked in class at the subject

I have had limited education in grammatical terms and meaning, sentence construction and paragraph structuring, however, as a student I have been able to produce written work that is clear, concise, in the formal register and grammatically correct (Grellier & Goerke, 2014, p. 159). My success is related to my use of language in real life experiences (Fellowes, 2010, p. 14) through nursing and childcare where documentation is to be objective not subjective, although when writing paragraphs I can get lost using bad phrases and not stay on topic. Writers Diet provided me with a ‘lean’ result however I have identified required improvements to be made with my writing skills as identified by Paper Rater

During this unit, my academic literacy has advanced greatly. After analysis from writers diet and paper rater. I have evaluated the results & comments and taken them into consideration as to work on my weaknesses. Throughout The semester I have acted on refining my writing via the use of online tasks, weekly readings, smart- thinking tool and peer guidance.

Throughout the semester, I have gained skills necessary for understanding and utilizing logic while writing. I am now aware that for any writing to be scholarly, it must possess an introductory section, a body and a conclusion section. Further, I am now able to understand as well as utilize most of the basic techniques useful in pre-writing, revision and editing. Through writing the “downloading from torrents” paper, I acquired skills in word processing, sentence elements, and punctuation. Further, I developed some special skills in writing a website analysis which is a critical aspect in contemporary learning as argued by Flateby (p 182). As the semester folds, I believe that I have gained the prerequisite skills in writing and critical thinking. However, I need to improve much on some of the common problems in writing that seems to disturb me especially grammar.

Over the course of this past semester, my ability to write has improved tremendously. Prior to undertaking this course, my expertise in writing was not as fine-tuned as it should have been. I had never previously been enrolled in a class specifically tailored to writing-- which was quite clear. Upon reading my past works, it becomes apparent that my writing style consisted of fluff, small words, and inconsistently structured sentences. These problems have, for the most part, been remedied with the coursework I have tackled in College Writing. Rather than long, drawn out papers that take an eternity to reach the primary point, my recent work is much nicer in terms of composition and grammar. I credit these improvements to the three primary