My first language is Chinese, and not until 10^th grade did I come to United States to speak and practice English with native English speakers. It is very hard to speak a new language or even write with it. Thus, I might not be a poor writer if I were writing in Chinese, but I am a terrible writer writing in English.

In high school, I learned about the basic structure of any kind of writing: introduction, body, and conclusion. Also, we dug deep in the structures of several specific genres such as argumentative writing, narrative writing, expository writing, and so on. To accomplish a good essay, I learned that I needed to have a thesis statement first in order to clarify what I am going to writing about. Reading various sources is inevitable. We couldn’t establish an essay without a line of inquiry to enrich our thoughts.

But what I learned in high school is limited. I learned the macro level of writing, which is the structure of different kinds of writing；however，I didn’t learn the micro level of writing, such as how to fill out these structures by using evidence and so on. I didn’t know that there is a thing called complex claim, which is one of the most important thing to develop a paper. Because all the writing I have done in high school was to write the papers assigned by my teachers, I assumed that the teachers were my only audience. As a result, I have never thought about defining audience for my writing before I took this class. Knowing the audience is the first step to establish successful writing. After knowing the audience, we thus can decide the appropriate style, tone and conventions to use in our writing for specific genre. The kinds of writing we did in high school was limited too. I only did one research paper through the four years of my high school, thus I lack the experience of doing academic writing.

By the time I started college, I was completely unprepared for the academic rigor I was about to face. This class has helped me a lot to conquer the difficulties of writing. In high school, we just corrected each other’s grammar mistakes or simply said “well done” when we did peer review. But I learned specific ways to do peer review such as giving fact-gathering questions that address the logistics of the assignment in this class. At the same time, in order to do a good revision for my own writing, I needed to respond to the substantive issue raised by peers and correct grammar mistakes.

The biggest issue of my writing is that it is flooded with mechanical errors. This issue has always been bothering me. Although we didn’t practice grammar a lot in this class, revising essays has helped me learn grammars because I needed to fix all the mechanical errors in my writings.

Now, I am coming out of this class with at least three assignments that I am really confident in to demonstrate the goal of this course. I feel that SA1, SA2, MP2 are all quality examples to show my improvement in writing and fulfillment in the four outcomes.