I enrolled the course “Academic Writing” this semester to improve my English writing skills. It is a good course and I have learned a lot. Here are some of my writing works selected from the class.

The reading log is my first reaction to the story “The Grass-Eaters”, in which you can see my interests in the story and why I further discuss it in my essay. The final timed-writing shows my ability to write a passage quickly, though not so perfectly, with a critical time limit. Then it comes with the three essays in which you can trace the stage of my thinking, writing and revising work

Essay 1 is just a trial draft. I did it more like a freewriting, which is an exercise we did in every class for keeping the flow of our ideas moving. I just put my original thoughts into the essay, accumulating the quotes, thesis and ideas, with little consideration of how to keep these things closely related. I even did not finish the ending. Maybe it is not a good essay but it is a good start.

Then we went through the process of “peer review”. My peers—two lovely girls in my class—gave me a lot of encouragement and advice to my draft work. They gave their opinions in a direct way by telling me “this is good and clear” or “associate social background here would be better”. New ideas pumped into my brain when I listened to them.

With the help of that, I wrote essay 2, in which I selected some of the ideas from my peers which I think might be helpful and tried to merge them into my essay. I added more evidence about the tone after I deep explored the story, and I finished the conclusion part of my essay after my contents became clearer.

After I saw the instructor’s comment on my draft 2, in which he listed 19 marks pointing out the unsuitable things in my essay, ranging from the informal type of the date and the tense error, to “too many quotes” and the contents that are not closely related to the thesis, I sent e-mail to him to further discuss the comments I do not understand. And after that, I found most of the marks are helpful to make my essay accurate and formal.

With the precious advice from the instructor, I completed the essay 3, which is the final draft, after adding more details that support the thesis and removing unnecessary quotes and trying hard to think about an attractive title. Then I began the long and hard work of editing, in which I proofread my essay several times, paid great attention to the red and green lines of Microsoft Word, corrected the errors the moment I found them. I tried as far as I could to avoid mistakes in the final draft.

The great difference of the three essays would clearly show a picture of how I gradually got my essay make better sense. Perhaps no matter how hard I tried, the mistakes are unavoidable. However, I’m still trying to–-reaching for a level that seems so far—and it is just in the process of trying to be a good writer that I really improved my writing skills.

I’ve learned a lot from the course and it is a good experience. I have a strict and responsible instructor who is particular about everything I write. I have lovely peers who positively discuss the essay with me without pointing out every grammatical mistake I’ve made. I have learned many new things about formal writing like “thesis”, “paraphrase” and so on. My feeling is: writing can be fun—in the freewriting, in the peer review, in developing your ideas, or even in the seemingly tedious revise work, in the process of getting down your ideas to the paper and finally seeing your writing become better and better.

Thanks for reading my papers.

Sincerely,
Wang Teng