Luis Gonzalez 5/18/22
I believe that I have learned a lot of new things that helped me improve and be a better overall writer and in general with my life. I had a tough time trying to adapt to these online classes. I think this may be because the programs and websites used are difficult and confusing to follow. But one must learn to be calm and to take things one at a time. I also try not to worry and stress out as it doesn’t help in anything. For example, open lab and blackboard were so confusing I was unsure how I was supposed to get these done. I did online research to try and get some examples to get the assignments done. I have also learned that I am still not the best at writing and will never be perfect. But I believe that putting all those tool wire games into practice in our writing was helpful as it brought some concepts that I had forgotten about or haven’t thought about in a long time. So that was super helpful. For example, one that was very useful is the one about how to organize your writing. And how to plan with a list of the process of writing first make sure to find information data related to the topic and so own. It helped me with learning how to do research along with working on when to do rough drafts.
I was really glad when our professor helped us out and gave us feedback, It was super helpful. I took some of her advice and it helped. One of those was installing Grammarly, it was like a second person reviewing and catching the things I was used to writing. I was using a lot of words the wrong way and how they should not be used such as their and there. I believe this may have been because of the influence of my family’s background as I am the oldest and my parents don’t speak fluent English like the article “Experience with various English’s” . I realized this when I looked into my unit 1 writing piece “ I am in my cold air-conditioned classroom during the summer in my Ela class. Our teacher gave us an assignment that was going to be due at the end of the week. I was a very scared shy kid, this was because I was a terrible speller, I only spoke Spanish at home. My parents didn’t know anything about the American culture they were immigrants from Mexico. In class, I felt like I never fitted in, I was always embarrassed and got bullied when they picked on me. When I first wrote this sentence I wrote it as I have never new of punctuation. It was a run-on sentence with no punctuation such as periods, and commas, and used the words in the wrong way to express myself which ended up confusing the reader. I was trying to write with the type of English I had used at home. I did this and I couldn’t see this always trying to add some of my Spanish accents to my writing and to me it made sense. But with Grammarly, I had some of those situations solved as it overlooked my writing and added some clarity as well. I struggled with trying to keep on top of the assignments I felt with so much going on with my life and other classes along with work made trying to be on top of my assignments very difficult. And then this caused some issues like my work piling up and not being able to hand it in on time. I believe this was something everyone in the class faced. It made me upset and stressed out over it. I am glad though because these are the ways to learn valuable lessons. For example life a;; ways have something to throw at us but once must stay calm take things one at a time head up and keep on pushing. Like the professor has said once something is better than nothing and that is one hundred percent true.
I had also always struggled with ways how I could start with ideas for assignments and how to do research for these writing pieces. I learned that there are so many sources but there are specific ways you could use them to help improve your writing and help make your writing more professional and help get your point across to the reader. I learned this was very important threw the article “Annoying ways people use sources,” by Kyle D Stedman”. In the article, he compared sloppy or bad writing to driving slow drivers. This opened my eyes that this is so true sometimes you read a writing piece and it is just terrible the quality makes me interested and wants to go to sleep. So consistency is vital, to a successful writing piece. Sloppy writing could be when I failed to introduce my sources like not citing what or where the information was taken from. And this is comparable to when one is switching lanes on the freeway with no signal lights; it’s unpredictable and gets the reader frustrated.
How could I use this in my daily life? Well, you can say it has improved my overall writing and has made me feel confident and get out there more. As I know that I am not the best at writing and fail to fix the problems I may have with it. For example, now when I text daily. I try to make sure my texts make sense the punctuation is on point along with get my point across clearly. And the reader gets what I want them to get across to them. As I think sometimes when I speak, I speak broken English which makes me feel not confident at times. But if I focus on some of the problems, I think I may be facing it would be super helpful to seem more professional and be taken seriously. As I have ambitions and goals and being a better writer and communicator will help take me a long way.
