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Victor Zhang

Professor Marie Webb

Linguistics 12-MW / 11 A.M.

11 March 2019

Language Self-Study Reflection

Language self-study project is a project that helps students improve their English writing

skills by completing various tutorials in the English studying book Language Power. For my own

language self-study project, I have finished four tutorials, and they are tutorial three, tutorial

sixteen, tutorial nineteen, and tutorial twenty-four. Tutorial three talks about the use of phrases,

clauses, and sentence types in English writing. By completing tutorial three, I obtained the basic

knowledge of phrases, clauses, and sentence structures. For instance, I realized that my writing

sometimes can be wordy, and I didn’t use enough adverb phrases in my writing. In my future

papers, I will try to make my writing more concise and use more adverb phrases to emphasize

verbs in my papers. Tutorial sixteen is about the apostrophe, and I learned how to use the

apostrophe correctly from it. After finishing this tutorial, I will avoid using contracted forms with

pronouns because they will provide informal tones to my paper. Tutorial nineteen is related to

verb tense shifts and contrasts. Form this tutorial, I learned how to use verb tenses correctly in

my paper especially when I refer to various time periods. Moreover, I realized the importance of

using “now” and other words as time indicators, and I will use them more frequently in my

writing. Tutorial twenty-four is more like a combination of verb forms, verb endings, and verb

phrase. By finishing this tutorial, I reinforced what I had learned about verbs from the previous

tutorials. In all, I think the book Language Power is a useful reference book because it can help

me make my writing more fluent and concise by giving me various tutorials that I can apply to
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my papers. In the future, I may keep applying tutorials from this book to my papers because the

experience of doing this project really improves my writing.