In M Cecil Smith, the Ph.D. piece “ The Benefits of Writing ”, Smith goes on to explain that writing can help the way you think, Linguist Walter Ong (1982) observed that writing is necessary to help the human mind achieve its full potential. Writing, for example, allows the writer to concretize abstract ideas and to “connect the dots in their knowledge,” according to the National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges (2003, p. 3). Writing might be beneficial to cognitive skills because it requires focusing attention, planning and forethought, organization of one’s thinking, and reflective thought, among other abilities – thereby sharpening these skills through practice and reinforcement. With that being said, this course this semester helped me focus and sharpen my critical thinking and work on my communication skills with others. I view writing as a process, just like learning to walk and sometimes you fall but not giving up is what helps you reach the goal of finally walking or in this case improving my writing skill and gaining more knowledge.

My definition of writing before coming into this class was that writing was a form to complete an assignment and explain your thoughts to a question. I enjoyed writing but only free writing because when I was given an assignment I felt as if the assignment trapped the limits of my thinking to researching a certain topic. I hated completing writing assignments because they seemed boring and I never really learned anything because my mind was closed and I was able to just gather enough information to cite and complete the assignment but not understand the information written down. Then to add because it wasn’t my first language I struggled with my punctuation and grammar a lot, my ideas never came out the same on paper.

In this first image, I included a photo of the second od assignment in this class, the Memo. I failed to parallel contrast and my writing needs more revision because of the grammar errors my message was unable to get across to the audience.  

Now that I have finished this course, I have a new understanding of writing which is that writing is not only limited to completing a task but I also feel that I have strengthened my writing skill and composing skill in the technical fields. For instance when I was working on my Group project on facial recognition not only was I revising the data that I gathered but I also edited and was comprehending the reading. Furthermore, these assignments given to me this semester help me engage and practice exploring research. Given the amount of research that was needed for each assignment, I was able to create a plan to find and organize the information I needed to input.

As an example, I show my notes that I would take in, and to make sure I understood the concept I would rephrase the professor’s words into my own. If I would revise my second assignment I would write down the information and then revise the information by putting it into my own words so I could get the concepts.

In this course, we analyzed a lot of articles and had a lot of peer reviews for our assignments. Learning to analyze the text and really grabbing onto the author’s concepts really help me understand the meaning behind writing a piece. For instance, in this third image, I show my understanding and the extraction of information I thought was important throughout the reading. This allowed me to understand what was going on in the article and the different forms like the texts changing between present and past.

Note. My free write for that day in class is included to show that at the beginning of the article I didn’t understand what was happening but once I started to extract information and analyze it I got the concept of the story. From this exercise, I was able to express my thoughts on the article and how to determine and identify the different techniques that can be used in writing. I was also able to look at writing from the reader’s point of view and to notice that one must focus on the purpose behind the article, the audience, who the article is towards, and the genre.

Overall, this course has been a great writing course In my opinion as a student. I have accomplished improving my grammar and my concept of understanding reading instead of just reading them to complete an assignment. Now that I have completed this course I can state that I can acknowledge my reading and learn how to use the different databases to find information. In all, I have practiced various forms of writing during this period that I will carry on and use this new knowledge in my future classes. I can say that I have properly gained a lot of knowledge to write and break down a writing piece to understand the author’s message.

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(2022). Retrieved 19 May 2022, from https://www.niu.edu/language-literacy/_pdf/the-benefits-of-writing.pdf