My Writing Journey

Yuhang Zhu

EWRT 200

Paper two

June 4, 2014

My writing journey

Writing assignments seems to be one of most hated assignments amongst students. Many students take a long time to finish a paper but when they finish, it is never long enough as professor asks. I especially have a lot of struggles with my writing skills. This struggle goes as far back as I moved to the United States from China. However, this fall quarter at De Anza College, I worked diligently to improve my writing skills by taking EWRT 200, a preparatory writing course.

Upon entering EWRT 200, my biggest struggles with writing were grammar and comma splice error. From the first day when I started to learn English, grammar was the hardest part, because it is much more different from Chinese grammar. For example, when writing an essay in English, you need to choose from many different tenses for different situations. In Chinese, there are no different tenses. Comma splice error was another struggle I had. I would write sentences or even paragraphs with incorrectly use of comma or periods. They sounded really unprofessional, but I just did not know where to insert a comma or a period. These struggles really made me dislike writing, because I always received poor grades on my writing assignments, and I wished I could improve on my writing skills.

In EWRT 200, the two most helpful assignments for me have been the chapter on “Sentence Types” chapter five, in the workbook English Essentials, and, Collaborative learning. Chapter five was really helpful to me because it has taught me different sentence structures such as how compound sentence and complex sentence are different. Also, the collaborative learning we did in class was very helpful as well. For example, I was called on to read out loud in the large class circle as seminar and it was a great way for me to practice the projection of my voice for speeches, and when we worked in small groups I had help from classmates when I was stuck on a...