Part 1

As a writer, I tend to go too deep into a topic and may lose the core idea. In my writings, the focus on the main idea is a bit distracted. In this class, I developed a better feeling that I may have turned off the track. When I was reading the assignments of other students, I jotted down some general words or phrases that could help me to be more precise in delivering my thoughts to a native speaker. It is not my first year of study in a college, and like many students, I got used to fast-track delivery. It is a habit I gained from studying technical subjects. In this class, I needed to slow down to dedicate more time to the writing-related problems. I think my first experience with this was the preparation for TOEFL. 

English is my second language, and my main struggles have been punctuation, syntax, and word usage. I have not always had a chance to practice the lexicon that is in use today, and my general source of words and sayings came from the books and articles. When I tried to run my text through Grammarly service, there were many underlined elements defined as “outdated language”. In some cases, I used a fancy but old word or phrase that I remembered from a book. I didn’t have a clue that there was a word that a native speaker would use. During this semester, I noticed that I keep making the same mistakes, about 25 of them. With every assignment, I repeated them. Luckily, I feel that I have improved on that. 

Part 2

By the end of the semester, I think we all started having a feeling of what volume of text we need to create. When I saw something like “minimum 500 words” for a small problem, I tried to avoid worldly structures, which for example, are common in the TOEFL test. I think I have been more or less consistent with it throughout the fall.
In different assignments, I tried to change the tone of my texts. Like in the U3 assignment, I tried to mix the newspaper-style while informing academically. The newspaper-style is more bold and full of industry-specific customs while the academic is more humble but direct. It seemed unblendable.
I have managed to adapt to the asynchronous class quite early. Firstly, I have had a more or less sustained schedule. The class was self-explanatory in terms of due dates. So I used a day in advance to prepare and polish or finish on the due date if I struggled. The Thanksgiving week with a single assignment was the most asynchronous event in this class.
I usually got stuck when I finished my assignment, and there were still 300 or more words to accomplish. Although brevity is the soul of wit, I understood that this is a writing class, and the number of words matters and should be longer than what we think is enough in oral speech.