Reflective Essay
During this summer session I have learned multiple lessons in my class of UWP 101, and I needed to write four assignments, make a webpage, and read four long articles in six weeks. It is a challenge for me to finish this work during the short time. However, this is a good exercise for me to improve my reading and writing skills even though I only four articles to read. Also, through these writing assignments and readings, I learned various assignment formats, structures, and descriptions. Although I faced some challenges in my writing assignments, I also learned and developed some skills.
Every time I write, the organization of essays, except lab reports, is the biggest challenge for me, especially the first several paragraphs of the essay. In other words, I am not good at writing introduction or beginning paragraphs. In this session, I spent a lot time at beginning paragraph of two assignments, responses of “Make America Great Again” and reportorial essay. Also, different writing assignments gave me different challenges.
The “Make America Great Again” paper, I researched a lot of information through the internet which about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton because I am not American and I do not have any interest for politics. Even though my professor gave some hints before I began writing this essay, I also misunderstood the topic and wrote the wrong content in the beginning paragraphs for the first draft. The professor’s hints gave me a kind of method to begin my writing; it saves me time to think about how to give background information. However, the beginning paragraph of this essay was not the biggest challenge for me. The most difficult part for me was I needed to analyze the political views of Donald Trump and thinking, if I were an American citizen, would I vote Donald Tramp? If all Trump’s political views are negative, it will be easy for me to analyze why Trump cannot achieve the slogan— “Make America Great Again.” The starting point of his propositions is making America better, but his views are extreme and cannot make America better, so it is hard for me to analyze both sides of his propositions. Nevertheless, I learned CDA, Critical Discourse Analysis, from this essay. After the first draft, my professor gave us reading material— “Critical Discourse Analysis”—to introduce CDA and under which kind of situation using CDA can maximize the convincing.
For the Reportorial Essay, because I supposed to write about a family member in this paper, I did not know how to give the background information and describe a family member before the professor gave these two articles— “Our Secret” and “Writing with The Wall.” This essay did not have constant structures of paragraphs, and sometimes it was like talking a story to myself, so I could give the background information anywhere. This was the most difficult parts for me. Because the background and development of my family is complicated, and the word limit is 1500, it cannot describe everything clearly. I need use the shortest words to describe necessary things, so it is a challenge for me. Finally, I still skip some information, which was needless and information that was between necessary and needless, and this information affected readers to understanding of why I wrote this family member. However, through these two articles, I learned that removing “be” verbs appropriately can make sentences have more “energy” to attracts readers, but it is hard to remove them in some places.
For the Transfer of Knowledge, because this paper require was making laypeople understand my knowledge and I wrote about the Turing Machine, it has two main lines to describe this machine: the structure line and the theory developing line. These two main lines are both important for a layperson to understand the structure and importance of the Turing Machine; also, Alan Turing is the most important person for this machine, and he made great contributions for modern computers through his machine. It is hard to describe both things at the same time because the structure is for the machines’ mechanics, and the theory is for grammar and designing methods. The theory development relates to some other knowledge which layperson may not know, such as the binary of machine reading and writing, the 7-tuple of the Turing Machine, and the grammar of coding. I needed to use the short paragraphs or images to introduce this knowledge; if a layperson does not know this knowledge, they may not understand why the Turing Machine had this kind of structure and why it is the theory behind modern computers.
The Website Report did not give me many challenges. Before taking this class, I wrote chemistry lab report for almost a year, so I knew the common structure of reports. However, this report was writing about a website, so it had a executive summary. The executive summary was hard for me. When I write an essay, I prefer to list an outline and all key points of the essay. This was my first time writing a summary for my own papers, so the first time, my summary was like a list of all things in the report. Thus, I searched how to write an executive summary online and wrote it again. The second time, it looked like a summary, but still needed improvement. Even for the final draft, the summary was not good enough for whole report. This was the biggest difficulty for me in this report. However, I learned the format of a website report.
During this session, I spent the most time on writings. I think these writing assignments gave me some challenges and difficult times for writing, but the value of my learning was more meanful than the value of the challenges. Even though I studied and developed some skills during this session, I still have some parts I need to improve.
