Steps towards Good Writing - Essay Example

 Steps towards Good Writing DQ1 Writing is something that improves with practice and focus. What steps will you take to ensure that your writing continues to improve throughout your college experience? Writing is very important to achieving academic success. Everyone can improve their writing by practicing and working hard. I know that I am not a great writer, but I seek to improve my using the Center Writing of Excellence program to improve my word choice and to make my grammar more effective. In truth, focusing is not always easy for me. I have a hard time surrounded by hard life that I must facing every day. That is part of the reason that asking for help is important. A key thing to do when seeking to improve is to ask for help. No man or woman is an island and it can be very difficult to plan one’s time and balance one’s life. You might need help. Sometimes this involves asking your partner to help you out, to help you plan your time more appropriately so you have more time to practice writing. But it might also involve asking a professional help budget your time and work on a schedule. There’s no shame in that. That’s why those people exist and they know what they’re doing. Sometimes people have so much on the go that they themselves are unable to get a grasp on it all. They need a fresh pair of eyes to help make sense of it all. And that’s where a professional can come in handy. Many of them are quite cheap. In the future I will use the writing centre more and will work more closely with a tutor to ensure my writing improves and I am ready to move through my college experience with confidence. DQ2 Identify the writing strategies you have learned in this course and how you plan to use them. How have your thoughts about the suggestions in the essays changed based on your experiences over the last 9 weeks? A key thing to do when writing an essay or a project of any sort is to make sure that it is organized. Organization does not come easily to me. I sometimes have a hard time with it and it takes many hours to make it work. But without organization a writing project falls apart. To start with a key thing to remember is the outline. A writer saves a lot of time by outlining the assignment in advance. What kinds of things does the writer want to say? How many points do they want to make? Next, it is important for essays to have a thesis statement that presents the argument that is being made. It is important for paragraphs to have topic sentences and for these paragraphs to flow together so that it is easy for a reader to follow what is being said. The whole point of writing is to keep in mind your audience and to ensure that you are communicating properly with them. If you cannot do that, then there is no point to doing the writing in the first place. Once a writer has completed the work, it is very important to revise. Very few people can write a perfect draft the first time round. There are often several mistakes and typos in the work which need to be considered. It can help to read the work allowed so that you can listen for mistakes or get a friend to do so. Bad writing with many mistakes not only is not persuasive but it can make the reader miss the point or get angry. DQ3 Describe the various university resources you have learned about in this course and others at Axia that will be useful to you in the on-going development of your grammar and writing skills. Generally speaking, I never use the university resources except the materials from the teachers from week to week. When I begin working on an assignment I usually do some online researches plus consult with my family members about the topic. Like I said in the Discussion Question 1 above, I only use CWE service to help my grammar. Generally, I do a lot of online research to help develop my writing skills and try not get lost because too much information can lead me to in conflicting directions. The university resources may be helpful in a way, but there are so many of them that it is hard to know exactly where to start. I tend to get lost in the jungle of all the resources especially when I am looking for something very specific to help improve my grammar or writing. The CWE, however, I have found to be very helpful. The people there are kind and are always willing to take time to discuss things with me and help me to understand the points that they are making. As I said above, everyone needs help sometimes, but the key is knowing exactly when you need help and knowing where you can go for that help. Usually I look online for resources or just ask my family members. DQ4 Describe how the plagiarism tutorial and the Turnitin service may ensure that you are an ethical academic writer. It is clear that Plagiarism is a terrible thing effecting many peoples' educational possibilities. It is a big problem that must be seriously dealt with. We know it is increasingly prevalent in universities and we know what needs to be done to stop it. The truth is plagiarism is sapping our universities of their educational possibilities. It is preventing students from learning and it is teaching them the wrong incentives and the wrong ways to write. We need to stop it. Instead of students doing their own work for a class or an assignment, they get someone else to do it. That is morally wrong. All of this became very clear to me when I did the plagiarism tutorial. Turnitin.com is a great service because it allows professors to see if the work of their students is genuine. This service keeps everyone honest. Its only drawback is that it is not effective against websites that offer custom written projects. However, usually professors know their students well enough to be able to tell if they have written the work themselves or paid someone to do it for them. Overall, I understand a lot more about plagiarism now and how negative it is to learning opportunities and to universities. We must take more steps to stop it and discourage students from doing it. DQ5 Effective formatting helps make a paper more accessible to the reader and helps the writer more effectively convey their ideas. Microsoft Word has a built-in help feature. In Word 2007, you may access it by clicking the question mark in the upper-right part of the screen. In Word 2003, you may access the help by clicking the Help menu towards the top of the screen. Review the information on formatting documents, using headers and setting margins. Based on that review, what features in Word might you use to help your papers effectively? Writing a paper is only half the battle, it is also important to ensure that it is formatted correctly. If a paper is formatted incorrectly then it is hard to read and the message in the paper may not be correctly communicated to the audience. That is a problem. When writing a paper it is important to have a font that is clear and legible. One of the best fonts for this Times New Roman, pt. 12. This font is somewhat universally considered to be one of the best. It jumps off the page and is easily read. Another important thing is margins. Papers should have 1 inch margins. If the margins are too big the text looks like it is swimming in a white sea. If they are too small then the text looks like it is running off the page. Headers are also useful as the help identify the paper if one of the pages get lost. Papers should have page numbers which make it easier for the reader to follow along. The should have bibliographies that are formatted correctly. In a general sense, Word allows you to open several documents at once which can be useful for going back and forth and doing a lot of writing all at once. A key thing when doing formatting is to remember not to get too fancy. If your font is fancy people will have trouble reading it. You must remember that the thing you are writing is for someone else to read. Read More