Writing Improvement Level 1

Hi everyone! My name is Haoran and I am glad if you guys are seeing this page. Welcome to my private writing space! My major is International Study and this is my last year in UCI. It is my honor and pleasure to have this chance to share my ideas with you guys, and I hope we could improve our writing skills together through this website!

My last writing class is WR 2 class in my college, so it would have been quite long time that I did not take writing class like this. From WR 2, I learned a lot of grammar knowledge and read massive books including novel and poems. Those reading materials improved my logical ability and comprehensibility large, and enabled me to be more confident to write an essay like a native speaker.

The biggest problem for me in academic writing is that I sometimes would mistakenly bring my Chinese expression habits into English, which would make my thesis vague and sentences unclear. As a ESL speaker, I think the hardest part for non-native speakers is to change their thinking habit into the language that they want to speak or learn. In another word, if I want to write like a native English speaker, I firstly have to think in the way of using English. My last professor told us that reading books originally written in English could be helpful in practicing thinking mode, and that is really a good news for me because reading is the part where I am good at and interesting in.

I did not very well in the Language and Grammar Diagnostic at Connect. Most of my mistakes happened in questions such as identifying specific contents of sentences. I was surprised by the result because honestly I expected a much better one, because I actually did well in grammar before. For some of specific grammar words, I did understand them in the way of Chinese (I learned most of English grammar in Chinese ), but I really need more time to get familiar with them, and I believe this course is just a good opportunity for me.

From the syllabus, the first thing need to be noticed is that we are expected to spend 12 more hours on this class per week, so we need to keep pace with the weekly schedule to get a good grade, or it is impossible to make up everything in the last day. Another significant thing is that we only have three chances to submit a late assignment without any problems. To make success in this class, we need to finish assignment on time. In this course, the major purpose is to improve our writing skills in various ways including reading, discussing and writing, and finally could enable us to communicate with other more efficiently. In the grade contract, the first thing to know is that all our grades are based on B, and this grade would be fluctuated by our weekly performance. In order to get a higher grade, we need to show more details in our responses, which may require extending research and efforts above average.