Writing Self Reflection-Yuhang Yi

Comparing to reading, listing and speaking, writing is the worst part in my language learning. However, I don’t hate writing; I just don’t like it. I used to write some blogs and chat with my friends online a lot through words. Those writings are causal so I can use some informal words to make them fun. But academic writing is really formal and it has many strict rules. When I was in Chinese school, most time my writing scores could above average but it still had a gap to the top. Thus, if for English writing, it just could be even worse.

The English grammar is not that hard; I think I almost understand and good at it. The problems are the writing of complex sentence and the use of vocabulary. A complex sentence is always hard to write and it is also not easy to comprehend when I’m reading. Too many clauses make me confused and lost. And for vocabulary, I just can not come out a better word so many times during the writing. For example, people always use “get”, but in academic writing, I have to use a higher level synonym such as “obtain” to show I’m an intelligent and educated person. Another vocabulary problem is how to spell specialized word or term. For those words, because I already know them in Chinese, so every time when I write in English, I have to translate them in to English. There comes a trouble which is the order difference between Chinese and English. For instance, “The Declaration of Independence”, if I write it in Chinese way, it will be “The Independence Declaration”. Another situation example, “Butterfly Effect”, it may be written like “Butterfly Influence” due to similar meanings. I could use internet and dictionary to search for them during homework. But waht if I'm take an exam? Therefore, I still need time to "enrich" my vocabulary. Such as here, I don't know if "enrich" is appropriate or common use. Or should I choose "enlarge", "extend" or other words. Furthermore, there are a whole bunch of American sayings and slangs outside I don’t know.

The digital story writing didn’t take a long time because basically I just narrated the international exchange experience. Those students’ comments did help me in some ways. I added some explanation sentences to make the story more comprehensive. And for plagiarism, I mainly knew it. And as a result of this quarter’s learning, I fully understand how serious it is and several to avoid.

And I think the more I want to learn are the usages of intext citation and reference list.