IE3 Writing: Lesson 6

5/21/2015

Hi everyone,

I'm sure that you're relieved that you've finished the first test of our course.

Feedback on Body Paragraphs:
Before our test, we went through some common errors in writing:

Use and, but and so to connect sentences in formal writing; and not to start sentences.
Expressions like However, In addition, and Therefore can be used to start sentences.
Use capital letters correctly. If you find titles in capital letters in your sources (e.g. BOOK OF TEA), this is to attract the reader. In formal writing, you need to follow the rules of capital letters. Use a capital letter for the first letter of each word (e.g. nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives). Instead of BOOK OF TEA, you should write Book of Tea.

Homework:
1. Complete First Draft (with corrections)

Email by Monday, May 25 before 12:00 noon.

2. Bring a copy of your first draft to class next week
3. Blog comment #5

Blog Question #5:

How do you feel after writing your first essay? (e.g. expections, challenges, feedback, etc.)

Write 10-12 sentences.
Use capitalization, punctuation & spelling correctly.
Submit by Tuesday, May 26 by 6:00pm.

17 Comments

IE3W-Shusei

5/23/2015 07:43:14 pm

As always, when I write an essay I have difficulties. What I find the hardest challenge is the very first word. After that, everything goes smooth.
To be honest, I expected much more worse grade because writing is my biggest weakness. Indeed, I made lots of grammar mistakes but it was a pleasant surprise to see good grades. I hope I can continues this trend.
As for quotation, it was a whole new idea, but I wish I got the idea of how to use them. I'm pretty sure I have to use them in near future like it or not.
In the end, I was grad I did good instead of doing bad and become melancholic. I never liked graded essay that much anyway.

IE3W-Chinatsu

5/23/2015 09:27:40 pm

When I wrote my essay, I had many difficulties. Especially, I felt difficult to write the paragraph within the limits of word count. At first I wrote paragraphs so long that my essay was less understandable.So I think I should try to summarize what I want to say more logically.
Furthermore, I think I should include some examples in my essay. Because of the word count, at first, I didn't include the examples. It makes my essay less understandable and less reliable. Therefore, I should include them while paying attention to the limit of word count.
Also, I made a lot of grammatical mistakes. In order to make my essay more understandable, it is important to pay attention to not only the essay structure but also grammar in the essay.
Although my writing skill is not perfect at all, I'll always try to do my best to write the best essay with paying attention to the points which I learned when I wrote the first essay.

IE3W-Midori

5/23/2015 10:36:16 pm

It was very fun to write my essay because I chose a topic that I am most interested in. I made a thorough research from different points of view. For example, I searched for many anime programs from Monday to Sunday in each time slot. After that, I compared one trend with the others, and found out differences. I also thought about psychological backgrounds and needs of viewers from my own experiences. In this way, I used both the results of research and my experiences. I think this is very important because we can see the topic from different aspects. However, it was hard to find a good quotation, especially expert opinions. I read five books related to anime, and also searched on the Internet. I always kept in mind quotations should be based on sources that are reliable. As a result, I was able to find good sources that added persuasiveness to my essay.

IE3W-Takahide

5/24/2015 12:50:28 pm

Since it was almost my first time to write a proper and structured english essay, I had tons of difficulties.
Firstly, is the gralyatical issues. I had problems deciding on what word to use and how to in a sentence in order to make the sentences better.
Secondly, It was difficult to think of what to write. Also, deciding on what information to provide was challenging too. However, we were able to choose our own topic so that helped. I didnt have to research alot.
Fortunately, we have another chance to write so I would like to improve my essay writing. For the next essay, I hope I can use the citations correctly. Furtuhermore, I want to be able to write the bibliographies without looking at my notes.

IE3W-Aoi

5/24/2015 01:21:11 pm

It was not as hard as I thought it would be to write essay. It was because we wrote it step-by-step. But still there were some difficulties.
One of them was to try not to exceed word count for each paragraph. When I was writing my essay and trying to put everything I was supposed to include, numbers of word got more than the word limit. What I learned from this is to make each sentences minimal but effective.
Another difficulty I had was to decide which information was necessary and which information is not. Also it was difficult to organize them from general to specific. However, being able to do those things is important because there is tons of information in this world today. I will keep what I have learned in my mind and try to write better essay from now on.

IE3W-Fumio

5/24/2015 11:24:31 pm

I am now sort of at ease because we finally finished writing our first essay. I feel that I made myself put in a difficult situation throughout the course. Since this was our first essay, we were only required to know simple technics or rules. I tried too hard on writing fancy essay. However, I have learned how we should or should not quote with the citation properly because of that extra effort. With facts, we should reword it but not quote and with opinion, we should quote, for example. It was and still is difficult for me to distinguish them. Thus, this will still be my challenge to tell apart facts and opinions. Moreover, the feedback that we had every time after submitting was very useful. Thanks to that, I could review it and apply the correct technic to my next assignment. Thus, though it certainly was tough for me to deal with the assignments, I feel it was very practical and will be useful from the next essay.

IE3W-Kana

5/25/2015 12:25:33 pm

I first thought that writing an essay would be very hard. But since we were allowed to write it paragraph by paragraph, it wasn't as difficult as I thought.

One of the things I had trouble with is writing conclusions. This does not only include the concluding paragraph, it also includes the concluding sentences in the body paragraphs as well. From writing my first essay, I learned that I needed to work on concluding paragraphs., and I hoe to write better ones in my next essay.

Another thing I had trouble with is using the funnel organization. I tend to write out of order, and it would make the reader confused. So I read over and over to check if I wrote it clearly. I felt that I wanted to be better at using funnel organization in my next essay.

IE3W-William Haruki

5/25/2015 12:39:18 pm

To be honest, I had written essays of this length and longer in high school, so I didn't find this to be a challenge. I did think that the method of writing it piece by piece was quite effective, as it allowed us to pay more attention to each section of the essay and spend more time on re-checking work. At first I was reluctant to exceed the word count, but once I confirmed that it was ok to go over, I didn't have any significant issues to deal with. All in all, I actually found this essay to be easier than what I was writing in my senior year of high school. However that may have partly to do with the fact that I was writing about a topic that I am highly interested in, leading me to write more than usual.

IE3W-Yuto

5/25/2015 12:51:21 pm

Writing the essay has both been fun and hard. However, it was not as hard as I imagined it to be. This is most likely because we wrote our essay step by step. However, this also made my pea-sized brain to forget some of the things I wrote before. For example, I forgot how I wrote the inteoduction by the time I was writing my second and third paragraph. I should have also chosen better sources. And hopefully a better topic.

IE3W-Kanta

5/25/2015 01:03:59 pm

Since I had a late start, there were many things I couldn't understand when writing my essay and had a rough time. There are still things I don't understand like the bibliography. But I was still able to finish writing it up, and theres a sense of accomplishment inside me. Although my essay may be inconplete and have many things that needs to be edited, the fact that I've finished writing it up is pretty big inside me. At first, I thought university life would be more easy and enjoyable. When I found out there were tons of essays and reports I have to turn in every week, I was pretty disapointed. But I realized after finishing up all these essay, that these things are actually helping me out to increase my English abilities, and will be usefull after I graduate and become part of the sociaty. Also the method of turning each paragraph in every week made things pretty easy for me. Overall, I felt this task was quite enjoyable and feel fulfied after finishing the first draft.

IEーW Azusa

5/25/2015 02:57:13 pm

It was basically very interesting for me to write my first essay. The topic was a thing that I had been interested in and there were many informations about it. However it was difficult for me to find the right information. It is because although the topic were mainly based on histories, there were different informations on some sites. Thus, I looked in some sites and chose informations which were in two or three web sites.
It was also difficult for me to quote. As my topic was about classical music history, most of the informations were stated and I could hardly find a statistic or expert opinion about the time period. Therefore, I decided to cite expert opinions or what the composers said about themselves.
In total, the topic I chose was very interesting and I enjoyed writing the essay. Also, I learned many things through writing it.

IE3W-Tomomi

5/25/2015 03:07:42 pm

I had some difficulties writing my essay and writing quotes is one of them. Because I was finding all the information through the Internet, it was hard to find a good phrase that I can use.
Also I had difficulties writing specific informations and examples. There was a word limit so I had to choose which would best fit and effectively describes the subject.
But despite all the difficulties I've had, overall I enjoyed writing my essay.

IE3W-Aira

5/25/2015 04:26:33 pm

In this first draft, I learned a lot.
First, I found that as soon as I wrote in a correct formual, it will be much easier to read and understand what you want to say in your essay.
Next is that I need to increase my vocabulary. In order to use difficult words, I think my essay will be much better.
Third, I figured out how poor I am about grammer. On the next draft I will make sure I do not make thoes simple mistakes.

Although I had a lot of mistakes and I need to improve my English level more, I still enjyoed writting my essay. My topis was about Japanese traditional colors. Since I didn't have knowledge of that I had to search for that. But in that process, I could get the knowledge and I enjyoed a lot.

IE3W-Soichiro

5/25/2015 05:55:27 pm

It was my first time to write an essay, so I found it quite hard to summerize my sentences. Every time I wrote a sentence, I seemed to get sidetracked and start another sentence with a completely different topic. But by writing the essay little by little, I could concentrate on the topic and stick to it.
Finding quotes from famous sportplayers was difficult, too. I had to surf the internet for a long time to find the approriate words.
I generally enjoyed writing about volleyball, naturally because it's my favorite sport.

IE3W-Mio

5/25/2015 06:06:32 pm

Writing my first essay wasn't hard as I thought. I think it is because my topic was the one I'm interested in and we wrote it step by step.
By searching about Disney, I got to know more about them so actually there were benefits and made me want to go.
Because it took time ( to finish one whole essay ) there are satisfaction in me.

IE3W Nodoka

5/25/2015 06:09:54 pm

It was really hard for me to write my essay. My topic was really vague and was hard to write in detail. Chosing which area to write about was also hard for me because thinking about giving examples that is easy to understand was difficult. Also it was difficult to choose an example that can clearly be seen that is related to the culture.
Also, it was searching for the in-cite information was really difficult. There had to be at least one example in each body paragraph in this essay. However there weren't not much of an experts information to quote. Therefore, that was also hard for me too.
The hardest thing for me was to submit the asignments on time. I stayed up till late and couldn't sleep that much.

IE3W-Luke

5/25/2015 07:01:03 pm

It was hard hard for me to write an essay, but I think I learned a lot. Before i wrote my essay, I had little knowledge about structures and in-text citations. Now I believe that I am able to write in a more organised way, having better knowledge than I did before.
After going through my essay, I felt that I need to write longer sentences. I think I need to expand my knowledge for words, and to approach my topic from wider points of views to make my essay more interesting. Over all I think My essay turned out how I wanted it to be, so I feel glad. I feel that you also get to know more about your topic by writing essays, so I think that it is interesting if your topic is what you have much interest in.

IE3 Writing: Lesson 6

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