Reflection on the Course

We started the semester with the fundamentals of academic writing: how to develop your

vocabulary and summarizing skills. Some of us were already acquainted with the COCA

website, but we were also introduced to many ways of using it that were not as common.

Furthermore, I believe that writing as an ability starts with summarizing skills: they allow

you to reflect not only on other people's ways of writing, but also on your own, by

comparing your way of doing it to the directions suggested by the teacher.

Summarizing is one of those skills whose complexity lies in their apparent simplicity.

That is why it is useful to approach it with a paraphrase. This way, you can reflect on the

source text on two different levels and deepen your understanding of it, while also

improving your vocabulary, since you have to explain a concept using our own words.

The section about the academic language was the one I was mostly used to because,

being a Humanities major, we mainly write academic papers. This also helped us with the

following assignment, an argumentative paper. I had already consolidated some of the

topics we learned, but I did not know, for example, that phrasal verbs should not be used,

although I knew that formal English writing prefers Latin-derived words, since they are

more high sounding. However, this also depends on who is your audience, for when I write

papers on American Culture and Literature I cannot avoid using phrasal verbs.

The different citation styles were very useful to learn but also tricky, since you cannot

simply learn them; instead, you have to practice many times until you remember the rules

without having to look them up.

The short report was an interesting assignment for me because I had to detach myself

from my being used to writing argumentative papers in many ways: I had to present data

as objectively as possible, restraining from giving them my own reading or interpretation. It

seems easy, but I only realized that the report was filled with my judgment and personal
interpretations after the completing the first draft.

Overall, this class helped me reflect more on my writing skills and on the mechanisms

that lie behind the academic English language. Now I know more specifically the rules to

follow for every type of writing task and I am thus more attentive when writing, even in my

own native language.