Professor Ahn English 114 10 May 2014 English Freshman Year This second semester of English has been a great experience. This semester for my English 114 class I had professor Ahn and I would say I learned very helpful things and was taught methods of writing never taught to me before. Of course at first I was a thrown off on how some of my classmates had the professor the semester before and I was the new student who had to adapt to this new professor. The writing in the class mainly consisted on the novels we read and I would say the ones chosen were fun and easy to read. Our ideas were helped and strengthened to further our ideas in making our writing more fluent. From a previous English class I was taught that a good reader is a good writer and I can now see how that phrase is accurate because before I would hardly read and my writing basically sucked but now that I read more thanks to this class my ideas are easier to put on paper. The novels we read such as Never Let Me Go, Uglies, and other text we read were helpful in getting ideas and work done. My writing has been tremendously been helped on because I am more confident about my introduction, thesis statement, and body structure. I think this was mainly because of the prospectus, an outline of my writing before the essay where thoughts are able to get written down. The prospectus helped me in structuring my essay in knowing what sources to use and when to use them. Luis Juan2
The things Ive learned this semester I would surely keep and use it later on in the future for other classes. Before I wouldnt really know how to use or bring outside evidence into my writing but with the help of this class I can now easily quote or explain whatever I please to strengthen my writing. Adding my works cited page at the end of my writing is also I am going to keep using because before I was only briefly taught about it but in this class our professor went into detail about the correct way to use a citation and even taught us the library databases we have in school. The library databases at CSUN are really helpful to whatever one is looking for because information can be shortened into easily found with easy key words used. Even after we still had trouble in our writing after feedback from our professor we were given the opportunity to go to the LRC at school in whatever writing assignment trouble we had. There we were given an extra reader to see and criticize our writing. The peer reviews were helpful were we compared, contrasted, and analyzed the writings of our peers in order to grasp and connected ideas to strengthen our writing. My favorite part of this course would have been the group projects. Working with my fellow students was a great experience and connecting our ideas surely helped our writing. Not to mention the group projects were fun and that being said getting the job done was easy. I think the group projects we did would have been challenging if done alone. The hardest part of the class was probably the research because the outside information was fundamental in strengthening the essay or hurting it if it was a bit off topic. The library databases again were fundamental to this concern of mine and also the paragraph structure was something that I had an issue with. Before I would use a quote from an outside source and just throw it somewhere in my writing and think it would help my work when it probably wasnt. I probably also had trouble with the shitty first draft because I felt it threw me off and it wasnt taken seriously. In this class we were taught to Luis Juan3
introduce the writing or piece of information with the authors name and the title of the piece and then the quotation marks. After writing the piece we were taught to explain the quote and how that has to do with our writing. Explaining the quotation only strengthens the work because one has information to gain credibility and makes the writing believable. One cannot just quote something and not talk about what it is or why its important. Finally, Im going to miss this class as it brought good times and memories forever cherished and the stuff I learned Ill keep using in the future.