Henry Wechsler Summary And Response

Dear University of Alabama Academic Community, The first part of this semester was nothing like I imagined English 101 would be like. Since I did not write many papers in high school, it was a struggle for me to challenge myself as a writer. In the beginning it was nerve racking and stressful as I wrote, but as time went on it started to feel more natural. For class I have written a summary of Henry Wechsler’s, “Getting Serious about Eradicating Binge Drinking,” and discussed the Pros and Cons to his article in a response paper. So far this semester I have successfully achieved the skills with the writing process and the purpose and audience analysis; however, I am still developing as a writer with grammar and mechanics. After our first …show more content…
I correctly identified the writing skills and made connections to strongly weave the texts together. It was difficult to figure out the transition between a summary and response paper. Once I had a clear understanding of what I was supposed to do, it was simple to complete the assignment. In paper one I carefully summarized Wechsler’s main points being very watchful to make sure I did use my opinion in there. While writing my draft for paper two it was a struggle to not summarize too much and to find the happy medium of using Wechsler’s text and my own personal experience. While I was summarizing paper one I had to remember that the readers might know nothing about the article so I had to be cautious to not leave any major detail out. However, in paper two they had to know a little about the main article, but needed to know more about personal experiences that related to my arguments I claimed. Also, I had to learn to better express myself with the arguments I chose so the readers would clearly understand what I meant. To improve my response paper, I worked on making sure my personal experience stories all tied together. At the end I felt good about both papers and felt like they had a sturdy …show more content…
By the end of the semester I hope to gain confidence on the usage of grammar and mechanics. In paper one I used the sentence, “He also says colleges should introduce the ‘three strikes and you’re out’ theory, if the student has three major alcohol abuse situations he would be kicked out of the university.” This sentence was a run-on because I placed a comma in the middle of it; when I placed the comma there it made it a comma splice. In paper two my peer mark gave a lot of suggestions with grammar, making me feel disappointed. Keeping what they had said in mind I ended up adding a lot of commas. My peer mark also made me aware of a couple situations where my word choice was not fully clear. Even though I fixed where they told me my professor also gave suggestions on how to make my word choice my clear throughout both papers. While I was at the writing center I had to practice using different sentence structures and getting rid of my bad habit of only using simple sentences. I can tell that my writing skills are improving, but my grammar area still seems a little