Throughout the whole semester, I have written more than 18 essays for my ENG 101 class’s blog. Wow, I never imagined myself accomplish that much before. At my home university in Cambodia, I only had to write around 5 essays at most for my writing class. It is surprising that I can survive this semester. Looking back, I have exposed to a variety of writing topics, the one that I have never thought of before, and learnt a lot from those writing in term of writing process.
Most of our blog entries were narrative or reflective work. Each topic had its own theme and focus. Writing for those blog entries might have been a daunting task for me, but at the same time they encouraged me to think a lot especially about my past experience. They are like a memory tools, stimulating your brain to work, to think, and eventually some memories flashed back, the memories from childhood, high school, etc. For example, the assignment to produce a reflection on the article “Shame” leaded me to think of my experience at school. While trying to think what to write about, the image of my first day at school just popped in my mind. In fact, I almost forgot what happened, but this writing prompt helped me to get my memory back.
In fact, each topic prompted me to think, to invent. Because of the time limited to write, I did not have enough time to think much about what I was going to write. So I just made an outline in my mind, thought of what was the main idea and then started writing immediately. This is all against what I have been taught in school. Of course, we are taught that as part of the writing process, writer should spend some time produce a list, a map, a cluster of their ideas. But with this class, I only had 50 minutes to write maybe a 750-word paper. Given to the fact that English is not my native language, I just cannot devote some time jotting down ideas as I have always been taught. Nonetheless, brainstorm the ideas in my mind does work though I might forget occasionally.
After completing each entry, which was not yet to be posted, I browsed quickly to check if all my paragraphs were consistent, had topic sentence, match the thesis statement, so on and so forth. I checked if I needed any more details somewhere, or if there were digressions that I needed to cross out. My revising strategy was to find the topic sentence of each paragraph and see if each of them grouped together would complete the message in the thesis statement. Again, due to limited time, I did not read everything all over again and again like I did with other papers. I did all this revising stage very quickly. So the revision could only be limited to check the development and organization of ideas. I did not have time to check my grammar or word uses. But not having time to check on grammar or word uses were not a huge problem to me because even though I might have made some mistakes, that did not hinder my reader’s comprehension of my essay, at least this is what I think.
At first, I did not really like this class. I even thought of dropping it. But my friend convinced me not to because she knew that we could learn something from that class. Now I am glad that I did not do it; otherwise, I would have missed an opportunity to learn more about writing. My perspective on writing has changed now. At first, I do not appreciate it at all; in fact, I view it as a torturing activity especially when I had no idea what I should write about. Now, because I have been forced to write, my writing proficiency is improving and I can write pretty fast. Eventually, I view writing as a time when I decipher my ideas and thoughts into written words. I even keep my own journal of my life in America. I mean I have kept diary before but I was in my own language, now that I can write in English pretty well, I have switched to English.
Now that it is the end of the semester, I can see that my overall improvement in writing skills is quite impressive, I can write better and in a limited allocated time. This is partly because I have done it for ENG 101’s blog entry. It has taught me a different way of writing strategies from what I used to, and given me another view what writing is about.
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