Reflection essay
I came to America four years ago without ability to write and barely understood when people talked. My reading skills was very low as well. Slowly, I have been improving my English. Entered in the collage I had problems to write. The writing center, which is a part of the collage is great place where a nice people helps with writing papers. My exploration of the center starts with the course of English composition. In the course so far, we were asked to write two long essays. It was a challenge for me because I have never written more than two pages in the foreign language. Exploration of the writing center along with working on my homework helped me improve my language. I have learnt a lot of new word and some sentence constrictions as well as numerous grammatical mistakes. Everytime when I come after writing center it takes me about two hours to fix my mistakes and learn more about the language. However, writing grammatically correct, does not mean write effectively, that is what I have learnt from the course of Freshman composition.
The course of Freshman composition is necessary for everybody. It is not just English rather different styles of the language – genres. Without knowledge of the genres it is hard to write. Or if to be more precise it is hard to write effectively. Genre defines everything, the audience, the tone of the actual text, the context and so on. One of our assignment was to write a rhetorical essay. During work on the paper I realized that every author has a purpose, he writes a certain message in order to have a certain influence and respond from a target audience. I understood that audience cannot be just everybody even if the topic is universal, like in my case, when I was writing about procrastination. Considering the audience’s background and publishing source it is possible to understand who indeed the audience can be and write an influential paper.
In the next assignment I was asked to write was a research essay. This was a great experience since I continued to investigate the topic of procrastination in dept. It was influential because in my personal life it helped me to be more productive. I got experience of reading a lot of research paper and It seems that started to understand better how scientific language works. The language in the reports is boring and full of terminology. In the assignment I got a chance to work on my ability to bring the dry language of the reports, in particular the key points of the studies and results, to the audience without scientific background.
One more important thing I have learnt during the course of Freshman composition – how to find good sources. By good sources I mean credibility of the source. Usually, I got use to find information in internet and since the information was found from whatever source I was satisfied. After the course I finally started to pay attention from where the information comes from and if I can rely on it. One of the conditions to get a good grade was to use reliable sources from library. I have leant the whole bunch of interesting things on the library web-site, such as how to find a great articles or study, that almost any book available even if the City collage does not have it, that there some interesting place I can visit for free or that I can read New York times for free! Finally, I understood the taste of a good article such as those in New York Times newspaper. Of course I had heard about the newspaper and had known that it should be a very good but when I just came I barely understood the language and the newspaper was so boring for me. Several years after, when my language has improved, I realized how beautiful, interesting and informative those articles are.
In the last three months I have learnt a lot of things which are fundamental for my future success in the collage, for my career as well as just my well-being in this country. Now, when I start to write a paper I analyze the audience and style, as well as I think about an effect I want to have on my audience. I started to think about what a context or a rhetorical situation is. Now, if I am going to write something, I want to make sure that the information that I will be shearing comes from reliable sources. Now, I know where and how to get this information and how effectively introduce the topic to a different audience. And of course, I was writing a lot that helped me to work on my grammatical, contextual and syntactic mistakes. The three months of the course turned to be a very productive and influential.
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