Question
| Please reflect on what you learned in class. What do you take away from the reading, essay assignments, class discussions, peer-editing? How has your writing proficiency improved or what would communication or critical-thinking skills do you feel you need to work on? How will you likely use the skills you’ve been practicing in your life going forward? Be as specific as possible. And be constructive in both your self-assessment and future plans to improve your writing. please write about 3 paragraphs. In this English class, we wrote 4 essays, Essay 1–Remembering an Event Essay 2 – Writing Profiles Essay 3 – Explaining a Concept Essay 4 – Explaining Opposing Positions In Class, the professor taught about many writing skills such as critical thinking process & strategies, critical reading strategies, most common grammar errors, types of parallelism, logical fallacies, distinguishing fact from opinion, types of conclusion, steps of paramedic method, tones of essays You can write about peer-review on essays, discussion in class( we read the book “into the wild”) or other things. |
Answer
Metacognitive Reflection
My writing proficiency has improved considerably after learning numerous lessons relating to essay writing, critical reading strategies, critical thinking, as well as ways of avoiding common grammatical errors. One way in which I have made improvements is that I have become a more skilled writer. I am now better at organizing my thoughts and expressing them in writing, creating an outline, summarizing texts to derive the main argument, and avoiding common grammatical mistakes. Additionally, my critical thinking skills have improved considerably although I continue to encounter a few problems in my efforts to ensure that the improvements are vividly reflected in my essays. One area of the study that I particularly liked is how to explain concepts. During this exciting exercise, I learned many things, including how to use parallelisms, how to provide peer reviews, and how to ensure that every sentence is grammatically correct. Similarly, I gained an in-depth understanding of the reading process through participation in various English comprehension exercises.
On the other hand, I quickly realized that there are some areas that I need to work on in order to become an effective communicator. For instance, I continue to encounter difficulties in efforts to explain opposing positions. I normally find myself focusing too much on one position at the expense of the other, meaning that I often end up writing an essay that lacks objectivity. For this reason, I am expressly weak in writing effective argumentative essays. This is a major weakness, which, I am afraid, might affect my grade negatively in the future. Nevertheless, I plan to overcome the challenge by undertaking exercises involving the writing of as many argumentative essays as possible. Moreover, I continue to encounter number of challenges in terms of differentiating between fact and opinion. In most cases, I end up presenting my opinion as a fact, thereby drawing considerable criticism from the professor. Fortunately, the professor has been very helpful in proving me with the necessary information on how to identify and present facts in different types of essays. I often like to view the learning process as a critical-thinking problem that I will learn to deal with through continuous practice and in-depth reading.
Finally, there are many ways in which I intend to use the skills I have practiced in my life. To begin with, I will use the writing and critical thinking skills to become an effective communicator at the workplace and within the community. At the workplace, for example, I will ensure that the tone of each written communication fits the situation it seeks to address. Similarly, I will be keen to avoid logical fallacies in my written work at the workplace because it might reflect negatively on my intellectual abilities. Within the community, I will use my critical reading strategies to give honest appraisals of diverse public-interest issues with a view to entrench myself as an opinion leader. I am always inspired by persuasive community leaders who rely on their superb masterly of writing and other communication skills to impact positively on society. I view strong writing skills as an excellence source of influence within political circles, meaning that once I improve my skills to an optimum level, there will be no limits to the amount of career success that I can achieve in the long run.
