Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

The more papers I write in English class, the more I learn about myself as a writer. Currently, I am working on my Unit Two rewrite. Once again I received a C as my grade the first time around. I struggled with this piece for some specific reasons. The main one being that I had a difficult time connecting with the story. I have never had to deal with moving to a new country, or adapting to a new culture. This made it hard to relate to the author.

I did improve on my grammatical skills. I was actually really proud of myself because I was able to get rid of some of my bad habits. For example, you may remember that in my last reflection letter I mentioned time sequences. In this paper there was not even one instance where I made this error. Also, with this paper I tried harder to consider my audience when writing. I did not expect that the reader understand me, instead I tried to explain where I was coming from. Another thing I worked on was expanding my vocabulary. I was sure to use a variety of words to get my point across.

There is something that I am constantly struggling with in all of my papers. That would be connection. I am still having trouble connecting all of my thoughts so that they flow together nicely. Steph even commented that, “You have good quotes and points, but the overall argument lacks consistency.” I am very aware of this issue, I’m just not sure on how to fix it. Hopefully, I will figure it out before the end of the semester.

Overall, I improved on a lot of the little things. I am not saying these things are not important, because they do add up. Distractions take away from the paper, and they make the writing less pleasing to the eye. Now I will pay more attention to the paper as a whole, and concentrate on making clearer connections within my ideas. Jessica 21:04, 30 April 2007 (EDT)