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Process Note

Dear reader,

My target audience is public people, I hope they can understand my learning

outcomes and thought about writing. This essay reflects my own thought about

writing, my growth and challenges of writing. I have much to say about the process of

my learning, from this course, I learned many useful skills and I can apply those skills

in the future writing. I write what I want to mention about of writing. In the rough

draft, I try to explain my thought as a story, which is easier for audience to

understand. I do not arrange those questions by sequence, I just write those points in

the whole essay.

Maybe my essay is not very well-structured, this is only a draft that construct

with my random thoughts about this writing course. I can tell a lot of details of my

essay of the thoughts and process of writing. However, there still need more

information to fulfill my essay to be more structured and easier to understand.

Currently, my rough draft can roughly explain my process of learning and my

outcome of writing. So, I think there should have some deeper improvements on my

essay to reflect my thoughts.

From this writing course, I learned a lot that help me improve my writing like

discussion, search secondary sources and cite. I was a student who can only write
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simple and short articles. The topics of my English writing are different. As an

international student, I used to write a lot of TOEFL articles when I was in high

school. Those articles are helpful to make me wrote an article in a short time, and I

still use some of those skills to write articles in university. However, there is not

enough to write articles that similar to TOEFL, which is an English test for foreign

language students. I need to study new writing strategies to write one that is harder for

me. In this quarter, my writing teacher taught us to express opinions and discuss with

others when we read articles. At the first week of discussion, I was some kind of

confuse about how to write and discuss with other students in this class. After

watching the lecture in the first week, my confusions are cleared. Because what I was

not understand when I first touched this course was clearly explained by my teacher.

He would put materials we need, explain assignment, and introduce different

categories of writing. One of the most impressive discussion was week 9. An article

written by Belanoff called “What is Grade?” This article teaches me to reflect on

different angle of defining grade. Especially for subjects like writing, which is hard

for teachers to find the same criteria to give score. We should not only consider grades

as a standard to measure one’s academic ability, but also think critically about subjects

that is not suitable to simply grade. In this course, our teacher made a fair rule that

completion is grade, which makes me easier to express my own ideas freely and with

more exploration.

As I gradually be on the right track, I encounter another challenge --- write a

research essay by myself. I never wrote any research essay and did not know how to
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write the essay by myself. This was a real big challenge for a new hand. Even though

the assignment helps me to write the essay into several times, I still made a lot of

mistakes. For example, I made bunch of mistakes especially in citation because I

wasn’t familiar with the rules of it. To revise my essay, I read the website of MLA

instruction, and I also read books called “Writing the Research Paper --- A

Handbook” by Anthony C. Winkler and JoRay Metherell. I successfully revise my

essay into MLA Style and relearned the MLA Style in this course. This is a huge

improvement of my writing skill. From I was scared to write a research essay to

gradually write this research essay in a right way. The process of writing a research

essay is tough, though, this writing course helps me to separate my time into several

parts that less my pain of writing a 2000 words essay. It is true that I was struggled to

write this essay because I need to do numerous tasks like writing drafts, collecting

secondary resources, having peer workshop, designing first research and revising.

Those steps gradually make my number of words up to 2000. Because of this

experience of writing, I can understand how to write a research essay and manage the

time to write in several parts to construct the essay.

During the time I wrote my research essay, I was first scared by the large

workload because I’ve never wrote 2000 words essay before. To complete this essay, I

also need to search different resources like primary sources and secondary sources to

support my thesis. The most difficult part of my process of writing is the collection of

secondary sources. Like most students, I barely use the library system to search

articles to write an essay. But now, the situation is different. I tried to search resources
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I need in the school’s library website. fortunately, I found numerous secondary

sources in the library, and I collect those resources.

From this learning process of writing, I improved my discussion skills and

academic research skills. I hope I will use those knowledge in my future writing

project.