Improved Writing

When the spring semester started, I was eight months pregnant so I figured that online courses would be the way to go. However, I had no idea how much work and how much writing it would be. We had up to seven assignments each week and every single assignment contained writing. In the beginning I thought, what am I learning from just writing. But as I went back and read older assignments, I found that my writing has improved just from doing all those writing assignments. I did not see the improvement until now that we are nearing the end. I feel that my spelling has improved and my grammar has also gotten better.

My writing is still not perfect but there has definitely been improvement in different areas in writing. In blogging, my writing improved because we have to write a min of 5oo words to complete the assignment. We also had to respond to the blogs of our peers so my reading skills also improved. In our blog responses, we used critical thinking and our understanding to read, understand, and then reply to these blogs. This exercise helped in writing, reading, and also kept the classmates social even though it was an online class.

Group work was the biggest challenge in the class. It is hard relying on people you have not met or know nothing about. The only way to interact was writing back and forth but it’s a challenge because there is so much to discuss and the group members are not online at the same time. This exercise required analyzing and writing. My writing has also improved from doing these group activities. Our discussion board was also helpful in writing because we wrote 10 or more sentences and continue conversation by asking questions for others to answer.

We also wrote a few essays that improved my knowledge on MLA format and it gave me more experience is organizing a thesis statement and essay. The requirements increased after each essay challenging my writing skills. Some essays also required citing where we got our information from and this was very helpful. PDR or peer draft review was helpful to me and to the writer of the work that I was reviewing. The positive thing about reading the work of others is that you can find mistakes in their work and it helps to look for those same mistakes in your own work as well. It also helped to teach me good writing skills and spelling. I was able to see how their thesis statement correlates with their paper and this helped me in making my own thesis statement.

Overall, my writing is better, my spelling has improved, and my understanding in reading is better. I now feel more confident to write papers in the future and not have the anxiety of not know what kind of grade I will get. I will jump into any writing assignment with little or no problem because in this class, I got nothing but experience.