To Whom Tt May Concern,
Welcome to Diamond tang’s Writing portfolio! This blog shows my track of study in the English selective course called “Advanced English Writing” this semester, as well as acts as a platform to display the achievements I have got after this course. Specifically, it consists of five articles: essay draft one to three, a reading log and a final timed-writing.
Looking back on the whole semester’s study, I would say the most valuable thing I have learned is how to think, write and act in a western style. Actually, I felt hampered in writing before just because of lacking this, which supplements my Chinese way of thinking perfectly.
First, My writing has become more exact than before. I used to regard mistakes about grammar and spelling as trivial ones, but now I got to know that actually they are fatal to my writing. When my instructor, Mr. Ron, returned the first timed-writing to me, it was surprising to find that I had made so many mistakes. Some of them were obvious and I can easily pick them out in review, such as the subject-verb agreement problems; while others were hidden. Only be resorting to Mr. Ron’ marginal hints could I figure them out. Before that, I often wrote run-on sentence or fragment ones without noticing them. Now I have given enough attention to these kinds of mistakes since Mr. Ron made it clear that all these would hinder a trader from fully understanding the author’s meaning. After this experience, I have developed the habit of proofread so as to make my writing more exact.
I have also developed the spirit of teamwork and honed my skill of exchanging ideas with others. If you look through draft one to three, you may find the dramatic change I have made, which should be attributed to my two teammates, Alice Zhang and Fendi Wu, who gave me some very valuable advice. I myself could not have come up with so many ideas about where to improve, since bystanders often can see more than the ones really involved. This exchange process, called “peer review”, enlightened both parties and acted like a think tank, from which I derived the spirit of teamwork. Exchanging ideas is even more prevalent on the ICA while we wrote reading logs. At there, all sorts of ideas flow freely and mingle with each other. By reading comments and articles of my classmates, I broadened and deepened my understanding of the stories we have read. Of course, Mr. Ron’s pertinent comments are most instructive to me. One thing I found out to be extraordinarily helpful to me is to exchange ideas with the instructor as much as possible. By doing this one can spot his error on time and practice spoken or written English. I myself revised the thesis statement three times and sent it to Mr. Ron by e-mail for suggestion each time. It turned out that with the prompt help of Mr. Ron, I successfully pinned down a short and meaningful thesis statement. Otherwise, I would have wasted much time as I lacked a specific direction to write.
Most importantly, this course turned me from a subjective writer into an objective one. I am used to writing according to my feeling, in neglect of the flow of logic until I attended this course. Mr. Ron has repeatedly emphasized that every assertive sentence should be well supported by concrete examples so as to make the whole writing comprehensible to readers. You can detect the huge transition from my three drafts. In the first draft, the opening paragraph has a weak link with the main body due to my former subjective writing habit. After the peer review, my teammates also raised this problem to me: they could not understand my writing fully, feeling that what I wrote is a prose, not an analytical essay. Therefore, in the next two drafts, I strengthened the flow of logic and endeavored to make every layer of meaning as detectable as possible. Chances are that most readers can find my main ideas and topic sentence for each paragraph without much effort, and all these have made my essay more convincing! During this editing process, Mr. Ron also reminded us not to plagiarize, no matter we are aware of it or not. The best way to prevent it is to use parentheses and page numbers to show that you have quoted something from a certain author’s work. Doing this can still do good to one’s objective writing, since from time to time one is reminded of the inner logic of his work so it is not that easy for him to deviate from his original plan.
Of course, having a dedicated and experienced instructor like Mr. Ron means I have learned many more techniques to accomplish a well-polished academic writing. Still, I think that through this course, preciseness, spirit of teamwork and objective writing skills are the three major things I have acquired. Now I feel strongly that writing is no longer an isolated activity. It tests your concentration and doggedness through its need of preciseness; it makes your personality more wholesome because it demands teamwork; and it trains your logic and cultivates honesty since it calls for strict objectiveness.
Actually, now writing is an integrated and colorful experience to me. When I built up this blog, I felt much excited. I knew this blog would provide me another opportunity to hone my writing skill, to exchange distinctive ideas with my readers and develop myself into an even more mature thinker.
Yours Sincerely
Diamond Tang
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