The most important advice , I’ll give to the kids next semester is that ” GO TO CLASS EVERYDAY PLEASE “. I know I haven’t been to all the classes but I learn something new everyday. Being in class itself makes you want to learn. One thing I have to give to Miss Sarah is her enthusiasm , even though it’s 9:30 AM ,s he’s always smiling and want to do new things. Make sure you do your essays in time , TALK TO YOUR FELLOW PEERS , it helps . Communication is very important especially in class. Take journal entries seriously and at the end just enjoy class , it’s not just another boring class where you only listen to lectures. Interaction is very importnat

Wow , it’s the end of the semester and I can’t believe it. At the end of the semester I feel like I’ve improved my writing skills in a few areas , like I never knew we had to write Thesis statements for essays, I did a lot of practice with Miss Sarah and she made sure I can do it well. I was told of my mistakes and I learnt how to address them. It’s all thanks to Miss Sarah, i never really did think I can actually change but I’ve seen improvement. I can identify mistakes and I started to give importance to review my work. All I really wanted to say is Thank YOU MISS SARAH.

So it’s time for the second oral presentation  , we did really good for the first one but this time , we’re really not that prepared for the upcoming one. It is scary to know that we’re going into class without any preparation but let’s see what we can pull off. This time we were given the topic , dependent and independent clauses. This is something , I’m not good at all. If you read my journals you can pretty much see how bad I am at it. I’m doing  independent clauses and examples. Not the best idea to give that to me but it’s whatever , it’s time to impress everyone I guess ?

This time I didn’t get enough of time to complete the essay draft but I got a good feedback from my peers. I’m probably going to do the same thing like I did last time , procrastinate and do it at the last minute. I don’t know why but I really love doing essays for this class. I’m currently trying to catch up on my earlier journal entries , I keep forgetting that I have the journal entry due every Friday and I remember to do it on Sunday evenings and tend to leave it for the next day and it never works. This is exactly why I have a backlog of some of my assignments.

I’m so glad that Miss Sarah brought in the tutors from the writing workshop , that was really needed , I never knew how to go and ask for help but thanks to them , now I do.The tutors were very helpful and  helped us on our thesis statement formation

The funniest thing about this essay is that , I don’t really have classes that I need to write essays for . My classes this semester comprises of 2 Mechanical Engineering classes, One lab , Univ 150 and a judo class. The only time I write essays is for this class only. It took me a good 20 minutes to think on what to write for this upcoming essay and I really didn’t want to add “fluff” to this essay. I only had one class that was my History class in which I wrote essays last semester. I really did wish that I had this class earlier so i could have got a better grade on my papers. It’s never too late to do better. One by one my essays will get better until I become a better writer.

My essays needed a lot of changes after this peer review. The sad thing is that I don’t have an editing checklist , I’m pretty sure I missed that class and I haven’t done anything about it. Even though I tried making my essay better . I don’t think it worked out that well but in other news , I have seen an actual change in my essays , I used to get a lot of comments on how bad my choice of words were but that changed. I really liked the exercise where we had to form our own thesis statements.

The next thing on my agenda is to review the essay and submit it for the final draft. This is on my priority list. I realised that i haven’t reached 500 words yet and I’m going to do this tomorrow.

I think the biggest thing this class has helped me was to identifying my mistakes , identifying was the first step , correcting them comes next. One of my biggest flaw was that I used to shift from first person to second person to third with a blink of an eye. Another major thing I learned is that every essay needs a thesis statement and a few sentences to support it, I never really knew of it until Miss Sarah told me to do. I realized that my use of vocabulary needs to be improved drastically. I tend to use commas and try to combine more three sentences into one making me look like a complete idiot.

I have started to make conscious efforts to address some of the problems mentioned above. Miss Sarah is conducting a few conferences in which there will be a one to one conversation with her on my mistakes. I think this will be very helpful. On a side-note , I am nervous on how I will fair in my WSPT.

https://docs.google.com/a/odu.edu/document/d/1x5BYCXc01ShYVrh0S-4zxVt3KWIRDJUe88JZRiFJ43E/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/a/odu.edu/document/d/1yOB2wXgpK6aYZPZBbC8UsArqRGN2G5FBgZnoew8QMJc/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/a/odu.edu/document/d/1ZXACYIrzraTr5CocZ2A6DIua-sowojMMIsTzEQILUJw/edit?usp=sharing