This semester, I took the ENG109, the college composition for second-Language writers. It is an English course and primary focus on English academic writing. I totally completed four major writing work in the semester, weekly blogs, Rhetorical Analysis essay, argumentative essay and remediation with comment. From all my assignment, I learned a lot and realize it is helpful to me about my future work in college and careers.
Firstly, the weekly blogs let me practice writing every week. Instructor was not required us writing a long essay every week, but rather, I was require to keep writing (usually to do the reflection of the whole week) every week. In my opinion, the blogs let me familiar with the normal writing and give me the confident when writing the English, essays, e-mails, blogs and so on. In the meantime, writing blogs also let me familiar with the coursework. For example, the most common topic we need to write for the blogs is the planning of coursework in that week. While I thinking and writing the plan, I have the more clear recognition of the coursework.
Secondly, the two major essay writing program let me know the skills about rhetorical analysis and argumentation. In the rhetorical analysis essay, I chose the WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) webpage as my analytic target. Through carefully watch the whole website, I understand why the website can appeal people, because they used some rhetorical skill including ethos, logos and pathos. So what I actually learned from this essay is to know how to use rhetorical skills to appeal people in my future writing. Otherwise, another important writing I did is the argumentative essay. Although I even wrote the argumentative essay in pervious semester, I still learned a lot from this essay, especially in researching and avoiding academic plagiarism. In order to writing this argumentative essay, I took a long time to stay in the library to searching the supporting evidence of my writing. I remembered that I also talk to the librarian for help in the beginning. At that time, I did not know how to use suitable keywords to do the search. I talked to a librarian and she was very professional to show me how to choose the keywords and search in the database. It is very necessary to me to know how to search sufficiently, because I have to often do the search in my future studying. As I studying computer science which is a subject developed at top speed, the fastest way to obtain knowledge in this subject is doing the search and convert others’ knowledge to my knowledge.
Finally, the last thing I did in the course this semester is to remediate my argumentative essay to a video. Remediation is a significant skills to show people our opinion, but it is very easy to me because I often make PPT or videos in high school.
In conclusion, the knowledge I gained from this course is important for my future studying, especially in paper writing. I will no longer to be fear of writing anymore because of this course.
Charles's blog 