My Mid-Term semester.

Fall semester is the longest one I have had since I started to study in the U.S. Until this day, I am on the way. I have five classes in this semester at St. Norbert College. Most of my time, I have been spending on my most challenging task – the writing class. Writing improvement has been set as my goal for this semester. In retrospect, I have reached some progress and I am still facing some challenges that I need to overcome.

At the beginning of this semester, I determined my necessarily focused task is to improve my writing skill. While mentioning to research paper, I have thought about an abstract and high-level academic writing. I was nervous about that because a lot of disciplines are different from these in my country. A range of questions about strategies to reach a good paper that appeared in my mind made me overwhelmed with. However, following writing strategies in books for this class and thanks to the teacher’s instruction, I have learned methods how to paraphrase a citation, take notes for reading for main ideas, response to writing, summarize and comment for it and how to look for academic information for my research paper. I have been familiar with it step by step. So far, I am more confident of my ability to write. Writing success is not unreachable for me now.

            Proficiency for academic writing is basically acquired in college. My most challenging task that I am facing is academic terms and structures. How can I express academically my knowledge about a field? How can I understand some authors’ expressions with complex structures? Obviously, I need to strengthen my academic vocabularies and dive deeply myself into these struggles until it becomes unambiguous for me. I hope that my writing skill will be improved much more at the end of this semester and I can have more experience for academic writing and deal with my graphophobia – fear of writing.

How is your semester so far?