Miluska's journey through Academic Writing

During this unit we learned the process of writing a good academic paragraph. Previously, in other English courses, my teacher at that time taught to me basic rules about writing a paragraph. However, in the class I learned a lot more because the leaning process helped me remember the details. Personally, ppts and group exercises exercises were useful to practice and make it easier to understand also the teacher’s explanation, and the worksheets were helpful too. One of the exercises was about a worksheet, we had to analyze whether which of the five paragraphs were correct or not. Moreover, we did an exercise that involved analyzing another classmate's paragraph. One of the difficulties I found was to find out the acceptable paragraphs. Some of them were easy to identify, however, others seemed to be fine, but they were not. If I want to write a paragraph in order that it has unity, I will need to practice more. I truly believe I can increase my knowledge with the exerci

After completely understand the definition of a sentence and how it is structured. We continue with the paragraph. The slides during class, the teacher's explanation and the documents on blackboard helped me to understand completely how to make a good paragraph. However, I believe I need to practice more.   One of the most difficulties from this unit was the topic sentence. It is complicated for me to build a good structure for a topic sentence and since it is the most important part of a paragraph because it defines the central theme, I need to improve this. In the past, some teachers taught about the paragraph and its topic sentence, however, I tried to apply the knowledge to my papers with an unsuccessful result.  Throughout the class and the exercises, I noticed my better understanding. I hope I will continue improving my skills at writing good paragraphs. Finally, I believe I have achieved the learning objective. For this unit, the task was to make an outline of

In this unit, the goal was to be aware about the sentence structure in academic texts. We learned types of sentences, parts of speech and sentence problems and "fanboys" which is an acronym for 7 coordinating conjunctions. My reflection for this week is that it was difficult to fully understand sentence problems: stringy, wordy, choppy and run on sentences. I had to read many times the material on blackboard. However, the exercises in class were helpful, after class I revised the documents for couples of hours. According to parts of speech, since I previously studied English as a course, I had a better knowledge on the topic. Finally "fanboys" were easy to learn, I find the acronym very dynamic. It was learning the coordinating conjunctions. Finally, at the end of the week, we had to do a test about our understanding of the unit. I did the test; nevertheless, I did not get the grade I expected. For this reason, I challenged myself to get better for the nex

In our second class, the teacher introduced us the pre-writing techniques. These techniques are used in writing to generate and classify ideas. There are several effective prewriting activities to implement than directly start by making an outline. Another name for these prewriting techniques is “brainstorming techniques”.  There are five useful strategies which are listing, clustering and freewriting. Listing is a process of generating a lot of information within a short time by generating some ideas and then associate those ideas in more detail. Listing is useful if your starting topic is very general. Furthermore, clustering is a technique that allows you to connect and contrast numerous ideas. Additionally, it lets you see your ideas visually in order to understand various directions your paper could take. Finally, freewriting is a process of generating a lot of information by writing non-stop for a predetermined amount of time. It allows you to focus on a specific topic, but

Personally speaking, academic writing has been a key concept throughout my college experience. Various courses require a high level of grammar and vocabulary, for example, I took five English courses previously whose professors expected coherent texts. My expectations from the course were to enhance my writing skills and enrich my vocabulary. Each unit of the course has its goal, for instance, in unit 1 students were supposed to completely understand the definition of academic writing. Our professor gave us previous exercises to achieve it. Firstly, we watched a video about the definition of academic writing sequently I took notes from the video and then we compared it in class. Secondly, some sheets about academic writing were uploaded in our platform; I read it and could understand better about the characteristics of academic writing. Finally, the process of doing exercises relating to the topic of the course was crucial to acknowledge academic writing. On our first class, we we