The following are five reflections I wrote throughout the process of this English course, with the first three describing my experiences in the course. I have documented what I learned as well as the areas of my writing most in need of improvement. You’ll also be able to see how my writing has evolved and improved over the past few months.
Reflection #1: The start of something new!
Today marks our last assignment for Unit One. Despite getting off to a rough start due to the technical difficulties of creating a blog, this unit has taught me a lot of new skills such as starting a blog, properly writing a memorandum, and defining words/concepts. We formed teams of four people to complete group assignments. My team is called the Meak Co. Writing Team, consisting of Melanie, Agnes, Kayla, and myself.
Original writing:
Defining a word using three different definition styles was not a hard task. Rather, I found the most difficult part of this assignment to be selecting four expansion strategies for the expanded definition. This was particularly difficult because I did not want to make my expanded definition too long, lest it bore the reader, but I still had to provide enough detail to convey an accurate explanation. In struggling to find this balance, I learned how to pick four expansion strategies that would help the reader understand “glaucoma” in the simplest terms possible.
Peer-review process:
This process was rather fun. I really enjoyed reading my partner’s work, and it allowed me to practice my peer-review skills. Although I’m still developing my editing skills, I tried to follow the instructions provided in our textbook to critically analyze and make suggestions to improve my partner’s work. I enjoyed this process because it permitted me to experience the perspective of an editor or lay reader; writing with this perspective in mind will improve my written work significantly.
Editing process:
I always thought the editing process would be long and tedious, but to my surprise, it was not a bad experience! In fact, I actually learned a lot while editing. Editing my own paper with the help of my partner’s comments helped me recognize the areas I need to improve on. In addition, it was great to receive feedback on my work, because it allows me to see my current writing skill level and made me reflect on the areas in which I need to improve in order to reach the standard where I would like to be.
In conclusion, I learned a lot of new skills in Unit One, and I look forward to the upcoming activities. I am excited to further improve my writing skills and get to know my teammates better.
Reflection #2: What is social networking?
This week we had the opportunity to learn about the benefits of creating a professional profile on a social media network called LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the fastest growing professional networking websites and offers many benefits such as expanding your social network, affordability, and receiving referrals from your previous employers. I have always had a LinkedIn profile created, but I left it inactive for quite some time. After discovering all of the benefits it offered, I was eager to start re-creating my profile again. The process of building the profile was not difficult as the website was quite easy to use. I would definitely recommend anyone to start creating his or her own profile on LinkedIn!
Our second task for this week was to continue our reports. We had to brainstorm and prepare our report proposal as well as an outline. So far, there is a slight delay with my anticipated outline. After receiving feedback from Dr. Paterson, I realized that there are more tasks that need to be done in order to perfect the proposal. Now that I know which specific areas need improvement, I have rearranged my timeline in order to meet the deadline for the proposal. By the end of this week, I will finish researching and editing the proposal according to the recommendations and I hope to send a revised proposal to my instructor, Dr. Paterson, by Sunday, June 28th for approval.
Peer review is becoming an easier task now. After peer reviewing a couple of times, I now know the gist of the peer reviewing. After peer reviewing my teammates’ works, I realized how talented they are. While reading through Melodie’s proposals and Kayla’s LinkedIn profiles, I learned how to write more clearly and concisely. I took note of how my teammates carefully chose their words, which allowed their writing to flow nicely. Their word choice and writing styles were concise and clear, which is something that I would love to improve on.
Reflection #3: Work and school? Why are eye exams so important?
A major task in Unit 3 is to complete our first draft copy of our formal report. I learned a lot throughout this process, which includes researching, analyzing and organizing my report. While preparing the survey questionnaires for the parents, I realized that many of my questions were not clear and concise enough. Hence, I had to spend some time editing the questions in order to ensure that the questions are clear enough for the readers. While I was analyzing the data, I was glad that I had spent some time editing the survey questions because I believe the newly improved questions have helped the parents provide distinct and useful answers, as well as recommendations. Personally, I believe the hardest part of drafting my formal report was the gathering of the data. It was hard to gather data because it was difficult to recruit participants for the project. I often had more people declining the invitation to participate than I had actual participants.
After gathering a sufficient amount of data, the interpretation of the findings was not too difficult. The mathematics involved with the calculations was quite simple and straightforward, so there was not too much trouble with the data section of my report.
Assembling and organizing the report was quite rewarding. Nonetheless, I am extremely happy and thankful that we conducted peer reviews for our formal reports because peer reviews are remarkably useful. I highly appreciate each and every single one of my peer reviews from my teammates because they inform me on the areas that need improvement by highlighting my weaknesses.
Lastly, I also did a peer-review for Kayla’s report and I found it to be a really enjoyable read. Reading Kayla’s report helped me reflect on improving my weaknesses based on her strengths. Examples of such include: writing with clarity, being concise and using an objective tone of voice in my assignments. After receiving feedback from Dr. Paterson on my peer-reviews skills, I now know what specifics and details (e.g. intended audience, grammar and expression) to look for when I do my future peer-reviews.
Reflection #4: Creating the Web Folio
I never knew what a Web Folio was until this moment. I decided to start anew and create a new blog to put all my work and have it centralized in one location. Through the process of putting my Web Folio together, I realized there are many benefits to a Web Folio. Such benefits include allowing potential hiring managers, colleagues and future business partners to understand the type of person you are, and showcasing your work in a professional manner.
The purpose of my Web folio is for graduate school entry (hopefully), I will therefore heavily focus on my academic works and achievements.
I am hoping that this unique method to deliver and showcase my academic work will allow the academic advisors to acquire a sense of the type of person that I am.
The hardest part of creating a Web folio is the amount of editing that I had to do before finalizing my website. Throughout the course, I believe that I had made some improvements; therefore, a lot of my work requires more editing because I want each and every single one of my projects to be near to perfection. However, I am also happy that there is a lot of editing to do, because it does truly demonstrate the improvement I’ve made since the beginning of the course, which was one of my goals for this course (to improve my writing skills).
By creating a Web folio, I have also learned to how to familiarize myself with the UBC blog website. I believe this is an important skill to acquire because blogging is extremely common nowadays, and I believe that this skill will be very useful.
Reflection #5: Self-reflection and Assessment
While creating my Web Folio I have realized how much our English group has accomplished since the beginning of the course. I can see the improvements that my teammates and I have made since the start of the summer. And I am extremely happy and beyond thankful that I had such amazing teammates because I have learned something new from each of them.
Looking back at my initial projects I can see big improvements and I can also see how each of my group members has made an impact on my writing skills. By doing peer reviews, I have definitely learned some of their strengths, which include being coherent while writing, keeping my assignments short and concise, and, most importantly, how to arrange the flow of the context. All of the mentioned skills were weaknesses of mine and they are now slowly becoming strengths of mine. This was all because of my teammates’ detailed peer review of my previous work. As I have learned many skills from them, I hope I was able to help them learn something new as well. I hope I was able to provide help through my peer reviews as I gave recommendations on formatting, grammar, tone, and maintaining the referencing style.
These new skills and strengths that I have acquired in this course will undoubtedly allow me to be a better writer and will hopefully help me showcase my writing skills in my academic works. These are very important skills to have because I want to advance and be admitted to Optometry schooling, which requires extensive writing skills.