My Final Writing Reflection
The biggest challenges that I had are arranging ideas to create clear and easy to read essays. On my essay, “Relationship Between Shadow Puppetries and Religions in Different Cultures,” it was hard for me to follow and understand the instructions. I was also having difficulty following basic instructions in formatting. On my essay, “New Prospective View of The Struggle of Naga Tribe with Social, Political, Cultural and Economic Issues,” it is evident that I still had a problem following proper formatting. Nevertheless, I tried my best to minimize my formatting errors. I also come to realize, when I was writing this essay, that it was very hard to form a thesis statement. There were so many ideas in my mind but it seems that I cannot add supporting statements to them. In the end the essay ended up having no clear statement at all. Because of the errors that I had with my aforementioned essays I thought that I needed to address my problem associated with organizing my thoughts in relation to a common theme. This effort was not easy for me. In fact, in my essay, “Analysis of M Butterfly,” it was still difficult for me to organize my thoughts. My essay did not appear to have one clear thesis statement. The review of my work stated that I had many thesis statements.
Nevertheless, I have my own improvements as well. In my first essay I had too many grammar mistakes; particularly, in the use of articles. In fact, upon reviewing them, I observed that at the beginning sentence of my essay, “Relationship Between Shadow Puppetries and Religions in Different Cultures,” I was missing an article “an” in the first sentence, “Shadow puppetry is [an] ancient form of artistic expression with storytelling by using flat articulated puppets and using light.” I also had serious challenges in tenses. An example of this error is seen in the first paragraph’s second sentence, “Origin of Shadow puppetry is very ambiguous but many people believe that it [was] originated during Han Dynasty with origin-legend story.” There were many similar errors all throughout the said essay. Nevertheless, I managed to reduce grammar mistakes on my last essay, “Analysis of M Butterfly.” For me this is one of the aspects in writing that I had the most growth. Another aspect in writing where I think I had the most growth is in following proper format. The errors in formatting that I had in the two previous writing were no longer present in my last essay. I also learned different citation styles. This knowledge is necessary if I will be venturing into writing-related occupation in the future.
I should note that I still need to work on improving my grammar. I would like to become an expert in grammar even if this will be highly challenging for me. My native language has a very different grammar than the English language. Most of the times, I tend to translate my sentences from my local language to English, literally – I think this is where the majority of my mistakes in grammar come from. I also need to work on enriching my English vocabulary. Usually, I have ideas in my mind, but I cannot translate them into English because I do not know the equivalent of the words from my native language to the English language. I have come to realize these challenges more this semester.
In order to work more on the aforementioned challenges, I intend to continue what I have done this semester. This semester, I have tried to read as much English essays as I could. I wanted to improve my vocabulary so that I will have more words to use when writing, and reading was an effective way to do this. I also watched many English movies to improve my vocabulary. I also searched the internet for translations of words from my native language to English. I also talked to many of my friends who have studied English and writing so I can get some expert tips from them.
This course has thought me many important things about writing. The first thing I learned is that writing follows certain rules. You cannot just write the way you want; you need to consider your readers by understanding them. You need to understand proper grammar and formatting to make your writings more readable and understandable. I also learned that writing needs time and effort. You cannot learn writing by doing nothing; you must persevere and always give your one hundred percent effort to write well. I also realize one thing about myself through this course. That even if you were raised to have an entirely different language, you can still write in English and be understood, all it takes is practice and hard work. I enjoyed by classes and every assignment given to me, so I intend to be working on acquiring knowledge to write efficiently.
I think that writing is not just for academic purposes; I think that I will be using it a lot in the future. Through writing, I will be able to communicate well with others, even with foreigners. This means that writing will be beneficial for me even beyond this class or course. Also, since I learned to love writing, I think I will be writing for recreation. I want to write stories and I hope that many people will be able to read them. Perhaps, this is something that I learned from this class – to appreciate and love writing. I also liked the couching and the support that my mentor or teacher gave to me during the course, which really helped me understand my mistakes and my areas of improvement. I should also note, though, that there is one thing that I did not like in this class at first. This is the writing assignments. But I eventually liked them because I get to understand my mistakes.
