Me and my last entry-level writing course: Writing 39A

Hi everyone. My name is Zhihan Liu and I am the second year students in UCI. I come from China and this is my second year at U.S. I'm currently double majored in economics and anthropology. I have a lot of hobbies. Drawing is my favorite and I also do it in a somewhat professional state, instead of just a hobby.

The last writing course I took before writing 39A was Academic English Writing 20C. The focus was annotated bibliography and some basic grammars and syntax. I learned how to write in MLA format and how to cite sources correctly. I also learned what was annotated bibliography and how to write it.

I think I still has a lot of problems on writing effectively. In the past, when I was taking one of my anthropology class, I found that I had problems on using verbs correctly. I didn't know how to use a verb. For instance, I remembered that I used the word "resume" without adding anything after the word. My professor said he was confused because I was supposed to say "resume something" instead of just saying "resume." And I have problems on writing one thing in different words. I think Maybe I am not familiar enough with the language as English is my second language. But I tried to overcome it by looking up in the dictionary and finding various words.

I think I am good at some basic grammars. In the course Academic English Writing 20B, I seldomly had grammar problems on run-on sentence, relative pronouns and so on. However, my classmates would have lots of those problems. I think that is because I took a lot of effort on remember my mistakes when I was studying grammar in SAT.

I did wrong on six questions on Language and Grammar Diagnostic at Connect. I have problem with italic form of articles, which is also a form of citation. I do not know where to use italic words and where to not. I also have other problems like using "and" to connect two sentence or using a full stop. I do not understand a phrase "in its wake" and its relationship to "behind." This result is a little surprising to me because I thought I knew how to do in-text citation as I was taught by the former writing classes.

Summary about the course: 1. syllabus: This is a time-intensive class. I have to anticipate 12-14 hours per week to succeed in this course. 2. course objective: the objective is to make me a better all-round communicator. I will develop many good habits in writing like creative and responsible and learn lots of writing genres. 3. grade contract: if I do all the homework on time every week I will end up to have 84 on my final grade. I can do pretty well on the weekly assignment to get one more point each week. I can also do extra credit homework to get extra point.