Working Toward the Objectives

Welcome to my week 2 reflection blog! In this blog, I will be reflecting on the practices that I have done, and analyzing what I have learned related to our course objectives.

Practice communication skills by composing in different types of media (written)

In the past two weeks, I have done a quiz about grammar on Connect, which helped me identify one of my weaknesses in punctuation. In my high school English class, my teacher told me to avoid using semicolons because it was easy to make a mistake. During the practice, I kept myself away from the choices that contained semicolons, although they were the correct answer! At least I have identified my problem, which is the first step working toward the course objectives “practice communication skills by composing in writing.” I learned that I should use the recharge function on Connect to practice more!

Improve your written literacy (Annotations)

In week 2, I did the 15 minutes practice session about integrating sources into our writing, which was a brief practice but helped a lot in refreshing my memories and answering some of my questions. After the practice session, I can identify the difference between summarizing and paraphrasing, which are two vague terms for me in the past. I learned that the summary should only be 1-2 sentences long, while paraphrasing better is as long as the original text. I was used to breaking my summarization into three or four sentences but I better change that in the future.

Practice metacognitive reading of a variety of texts, both public discourse and academic discourse--Develop habits for engaged reading making

During reading and annotating the scholarly essay “Looking into the Magic Mirror” by Haas and Trapedo, I got a chance to practice the annotation skills that I learned from the previous practice. The practice also presents some ways of getting engaged in reading. I think asking questions is one of the best methods for me to use in the future. Also, I am used to annotating while reading, but I seldom predict the main idea through the titles and subtitles. Although writing a summary is one of the annotating methods, I still doubt the reason behind doing it and the effectiveness of it. I followed the annotating steps as Connect suggested, but found it difficult reading an intense scholarly essay. I think the reason is that some vocabulary and sentence structures are too completed for me to understand, which are the aspects that I need to work on.

Understand the importance of reflection

After two weeks of practicing, reading, and writing, I realized that I should alter my way of learning this class. I always write too much but feel like gaining nothing from it. After writing this reflection, I uncover my weaknesses in using semicolons and in understanding scholarly essays. I learned a different perspective about Disney movies from the essay written by Haas and Trapedo; and learned the values behind advertisements, so-called social pedagogy. In the next following weeks, I might consider condensing my writings and focus more on grammar correctness.