Mid-semester at St. Norbert College

    Mid-semester is halfway to the success most of the students are making achievements in the middle of the semester, which qualifies them for success in the college, but there are also students who face difficulties and challenges. I am one of the students who has faced some of the challenges, to clarify this is the first semester for me at St. Norbert College and I think it's a wonderful experience, but you need patience and diligence. The challenges that I faced are managing my time and classes, and making new friends.

    Time is a precious thing, and if you could control your time you will make your life easier. The reason why my time is structured is that I have four Classes, and that makes my schedule so busy. For example, I spend most of my time doing the homework for these classes. This is true, I struggle at work but always repeat to myself do not give up.

    The second challenge is to make friends in college. I do not mean that I do not have friends, but in the past, I was a very social person. I think the reason I am no longer as I was because I did not accustom to college life. Before I came here I was a student in Seattle Washington, I studied English there, and I think the reason why I cannot involve here because I accustomed to my friends there.

   In conclusion, we all have problems in life, but every one of us has a way to solve problems. So far I am satisfied with myself because I knew this is the beginnings of my college life and I know that the future will be better.

Best ways to acquire new ( academic) vocabulary

For international students like me, vocabulary is most critical part for mastering a new language like English. Obviously, how to remember vocabularies efficiently becomes the concern people like me looking for. As far as I am concerned, there are several ways for language learning person to utilize in order to obtain new academic vocabulary.

First, using flashcards is a real wonderful tool to memorize unknown academic vocabulary. The more times you see words, the more quickly you could know them quiet well since for language learning-process, repetition makes perfect, and also you can use spare time you have to review those new words. For instance, when I was in middle school, I used this way to remember the words that we were supposed to handle in order to pass the English exam. Finally, I passed the exam and got a good result at that test.

Second, it is useful to remember some different sentences which include the words you are going to memorize because you can fully comprehend the meanings of the words in different situation. In this way, you could come up the sentences with words which can fasten your memory and you can use words properly.

Last but not the least, imagination also could assist you handle fresh words. One of the reason is using abstract connection with words and picture. This is because from statistic studies, human can know and memorize knowledge fast by connecting another things which they have already known. For example, I would image that a man who is powerful is sitting on a chair to memorize the word ‘chairman’. 

In summary, applying flashcards, remembering words with sentences and using imagination could help you obtain new words faster than using tedious ways. The most importantly, you should figure out which way is best fit you. Therefore, we can study more efficiently and use extra time to explore new things in your own world. 

Strategies for finding reliable and useful sources for academic writing

HOW START A PERFECT PAPER

For most of the students, collecting information may be the hardest part to do a paper research, not because it’s time-consuming but rather because the information has to be truthful. In this era, the internet is the principal source for students, the only problem with this is that not all the information from there is real. Some strategies to find reliable information are: Look at the link address; look for the author’s information; and look for who owns the site.

  
One of the easiest ways to see if the information is reliable is looking at the link address. The link address is the network code to enter a page, every link address has a domain that can tell us a lot about what are we reading. A preferred source for students is Wikipedia, its link address is www. wikipedia.org; as it’s possible to see its domain is “.org,” this says us that this source it’s not reliable at all. It’s important to consider that anyone can start their own website and put in there whatever their want. For this reason, domains like .org or .edu are not recommended to cite

Another way to see the information’s truthfulness is looking for the author’s information. As it’s mentioned before, anyone can put information on the internet; an ideal source must be written by professionals or people who have been specialized in their area. Lots of information on the internet it’s posted by people who only feel interested and want to say their opinion. For this reasons looking to the author’s qualifications can tell how much quality the source has.

The last but not least important way is to check if the 
information provided by the page contains a bibliography. For researching, author’s ideas require being sustained by other ideas. If there are no sources cited in the page, it is impossible to verify the information and see where all the information comes from.

Having truthful sources is having a truthful paper. Looking for information is an essential step if the student doesn’t follow it correctly, getting the optimum result will be impossible. With the easy steps provided that just require a few mouse-clicks, this ‘hard’ step will look easier as well.

You are welcome,

Cesar.

Expressing my opinion in academic writing

Academic writing is an easy and understandable way for everyone. Also is a beautiful way to express what's going on in your mind. Most people have some good ideas, but most of them cannot explain their ideas to others, so academic writing is the best and easy way for them to says or share their thoughts. I believe that academic writing is the best way to explain your thoughts for many reasons, it can make your writing easy, understandable and arrangeable.

First of all, in my opinion, academic writing can make the reader knows your ideas quickly and make the reader knows what are you thinking about. For example, if you want to write about the culture in Asia the reader will be known your article very quickly by the first step of the academic writing, which is the introduction.

Also, it can make your writing understandable for everyone, and make the reader understand the article very well through the steps you follow in your writing. For example, when you explain your ideas in specific ways and easy steps your ideas will be easy to understand.

In addition, arrange your thoughts in writing is something essential and important. It makes your writing interesting and enjoyable for the reader also, make it easier for you to take out ideas from your mind if the ideas arranged occupies a particular order.

In conclusion, expression through academic writing is a very nice way to bring out your thoughts that you cannot say it to others. In my opinion, explain your idea by writing better than you say it to others because the writing makes the reader understand your idea in his own way.

 ?Now, what about you? What are your opinions about academic writing