Reflection Memo: What I Learned In A Writing Class

Reflection Memo Attending the high school in the US, I had basic and yet solid knowledge of writing academic papers such as how to structure the paper, what is TEA, how should citation be. However, since all my previous English classes have focused on literary analysis, I was used to following the general structure of writing an essay, such as writing only one-sentence thesis, etc., and did not have specific training on exactly how to improve my writing. Before taking this class, I had expectations of learning how to write in a more professional setting. Now, after a semester of 76-100, I have improved my reading and writing skills in many different perspectives. First, I learned some valuable reading skills that will assist me in understanding the articles and …show more content…
After reading long articles such as Lu et al.’s and Henig’s together in class, I studied some strategies such as focusing on topic sentences, introduction or concluding paragraphs when I am trying to get the gist of the article. Also, I learned the importance of writing summaries because in this course, despite which genres are we working on, we always started with summary since it will help us to understand the main ideas of the articles. Personally, I also sense a change in my writing process after taking this course. Before taking this class, I tend to follow what my brain and thoughts when I write. However, after hearing so many lectures presented in class, I begin to improve my writing from the creating process: I start to care about what will readers anticipate and when writing the papers, I will go back to check the subjects of each sentence in the same paragraph to keep the topic in focus. For example, in the body paragraphs of the comparison essay, I tried to let most sentences start with the subjects as the authors, Shell and