Month: May 2020

Outcome 6:  Control sentence-level error (grammar, punctuation, spelling)

Writing to me is a form of words being put into a structure a certain way that it makes the words flow. In my opinion, grammar, punctuation, and spelling is the hardest part of any essay you will ever write. For reasons such as if these skills aren’t used correctly it can make your words and sentences sound choppy, un-professional, and childish. When it comes to my writing career this is something I’ve struggled with hard, spelling and grammar has never been my strong suit, and in all honesty I still think I rely on grammar and spell correct to fix my mistakes. I have grown throughout this year in English 110 when it comes to sentence level error because I have taken more time to think over what I’m writing and allow the correct usage of grammar and spelling. The one grammatical error I seem to always misuse is commas, and I believe I’ve learned how to correctly structure them into sentences allowing my words to flow nicely.  In my third essay, I believe it used commas to the best of my ability as seen in Figure 1. While going through the work that we did throughout the year I found a poem that demonstrated very unique and cool ways to use grammar, commas, and punctuation in their poem. I thought this was really interesting so in my third essay I incorporated a segment from the poem to show the structure and meaning of it, as seen in Figure 2.

Outcome 5:  Document their work using appropriate conventions (MLA)

When it comes to writing formatting and citations are one of the most important skills for you to start to get familiar with and understand. Formatting and citations are something you will be using throughout the rest of your college career, and most times Professors will require different formats depending on what you are writing. In this case, in English 110 we mainly used MLA format for our essays throughout the year. I’ve used MLA format the most in my life and have become very familiar with it. Formatting and citations aren’t just for you but they are used to give proper recognition for their words, that aren’t yours. This comes in forms such as quotations marks, in text citations, as well as properly using the authors names in your writing. As we all know, improperly or failing to cite words that aren’t yours come with serious consequences. At the beginning of this class I was a little rusty using MLA citations because in highschool we would just use a citation generator and not write it ourselves, so this set me back a bit when It came to writing them myself. Later on in the semester I began to understand what goes where in the situation and eventually was able to cite an article or paper without looking at guides to help create a citation, I began to know what information to look for when it came to citations. In my first essay, as seen in Figure 1 and 2, my citations were very minimal and just met the requirements but then looking at my third essay, as seen in Figure 3and 4, I started to use more citation sources and incorporate them better into my writing.