I used to fear the college English writing course because I am not a native language learner. I started to learn English when I was in kindergarten, however Americans can still hear my accent when I speak and discover some of the grammar mistakes. I had already heard about English 1004 from Chinese upperclassmen last semester and they told me that English 1004 is not an easy class. According to the course description from the Freshman English Department, “English 1004 requires students to write at least twenty-five pages by the end of the semester after reading, discussing, drafting, re-reading, and revising.”(Freshman English Website) At first, I felt this class was challenging because I have never written 25 pages in one semester. Also, from the professor’s feedback of my first draft of the TIB essay, I was discouraged because the professor commented that my essay needed a lot more work. Most of the paragraphs were confusing and grammatically incorrect and one of the summaries lost one important detail.
….One of the class activities I like most is that the instructor picked one paragraph from some of our peers’ essays and divided us into four small groups to compete for finding out grammatical errors and sentence usage errors. Although you may feel embarrassed when you recognize the essay is yours, it is still a good opportunity for you to revise your essay based on your team’s cooperation and you will never make the same mistake again. Also, seeing other peers correct my essay assisted me to view my essay in a different perspective. Because of the doubtfulness and critical thinking skills, your classmates can find out the mistakes you have never noticed.
The course covered lots of material and topics about human rights, humanism and the humanity, including empathy, human rights, gun violence and STEM subjects and humanities. Some of the topics are related to our daily life and some of the topics are quite controversial and reflected the American culture. We read and watched various types of material such as the official website of the United Nations, YouTube videos, comic books, Times Magazines, and New York Times….Additionally, we had to write essays based on these topics and it was the major part of the class. Each essay demonstrated a different style or form of writing. For the This I Believe essay, all the authors expressed their points of view rhetorically by using different stories. However, they all shared the similar ideas about empathy and compassion. Empathy and consolation, reciprocity and the sense of fairness are all moral behaviors in evolved democratic society. Historically, the monarch stated that he or she was distributed by the god to regulate the whole society. With the involvement of religion and god, the citizens try to care and help others because they believe that the gods bless them. Nowadays, people pursue happiness and equality by the tool of ethical codes and believe that moral behaviors, like empathy, are highly needed in the society.
….Gun violence is one of the most controversial topics in America. People who live in different states or regions may have different points of views. Some of the American citizens believe that prohibition of guns is the violation of human rights, however some of the citizens contradict that. That creates a good topic for the third argument essay. In the class, there were lots of debates going on and people held different perspectives. Our goal was to formulate an argument for yourself and analyze different kinds of source materials to support our points. I planned my essay by taking a position, explaining the counter-arguments, and providing evidence for my argument. This kind of argument essay develops our critical thinking and is needed for our future college study.
For the last part of the course, we moved from human rights and humanism to humanities which are the studies intended to provide general information and intellectual skills. Recently, as the price of the tuition rises, there is a tendency that more and more people shift to STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) instead of the humanities. For this group project, most of the work was done by group collaboration. We read the articles and found out the most important aspects of the article and designed several questions to make a survey. After this, there was a symposium to show the results of the survey and demonstrated to the whole class.
Throughout this semester, I noticed that my writing is become much more polished than the start of the semester. I am surprised by my progress and feel that I may not be terrified by a bunch of reading materials and essays. I have developed not only the writing skill itself, but also the reading, oral presentation, and critical thinking skills. I am not afraid of the further writing course like English 1010 or Writing course in the future study because I have already led a solid foundation through the course of English 1004. For this semester, one of the accomplishment is I get more involved in the campus and I felt that the adjusting process has already gone. I was selected as an FYE (Freshman Year Experience) mentor for fall 2014. Therefore, I am going to share my experiences with the international freshman about my experience and help them for the college study. There are still things I need to work on and improve such as the grammar like verb tense and the punctuation. For some of my oral speaking and writing, there are still some grammatical mistakes, especially the confusion of the verb tenses and the usage of comma. However, my goal for next semester is try to get over it and make my essay much more American.
–Qianjiao, English 1004, spring 2014
Before I came here, I always heard gun violence news and reports on TV. At that time I just thought the U.S. government should not allow people to carry guns because guns made citizens in danger, and they were so “lazy” that they still did not make laws to ban guns after so many tragedies happened. But now, I had been in America for one school year. I lived with local students and knew more and more about guns. My thought changed. Now I think we cannot forbid all guns arbitrarily based on the Second Amendment because it states the right of carrying guns. This law cannot be changed because it is also the base of other American law and American spirit. People will be worried about losing other rights if government takes their guns away. I never thought about when I was in China because I did not realized how important guns were in American culture. After living here, I could understand how people felt and the reasons behind their behaviors. This experience taught me that I should never had an opinionated attitude before having enough information of the issue. The more I knew, the stronger empathy I had and it helped me understand what and where the real problem was. What’s more, the assignment of giving an opposite-opinioned presentation left me deep impression. I comprehended that people had different points of view because of their different experiences and social roles, and there was no exactly right or wrong.
Reading several essays on the websites about humanities and STEM fields lead my group to question that how should universities balance the humanities and STEM fields. After deciding our topic, we tried to make a survey to gather opinions from different people. Working in a group is a totally different experience than working individually. Only if everyone contributes ideas, shares opinions and helps each other, the teamwork can be successful. First, each of us had to think about six questions before designing the formal survey. Then, we discussed and selected eight questions to be the formal questions in the survey. In order to get reliable and comprehensive opinions, we tried to send the survey to people from different ages, genders, and countries. We spent one night organizing and analyzing data in the library. We used two statistical tools—pie charts and histograms—to help us comprehend the information more quickly. Pie charts displayed the proportion of each question that fall into categories, and two-sample histograms showed the comparison of two groups of data vividly. Also, we spent another night quoting some critical opinions from participants and making power point for the presentation. Although we spent lots of time talking about the project instead of working, it was worth. I believe that it was our cooperation that made our final project succeed. I learned to express my ideas clearly and confidently to my group and also listen to others’ thoughts. I learned to give suggestions in a proper way and also got plenty useful advice. I learned to take responsibilities and also trust other members. Fortunately, all of us were satisfied about our final project. Personally speaking, sharing joy with partners makes me happier than being delightful alone.
In general, not only have I learned how to write good analytical essays, manifestos and argument essays, but also I have gotten more basic backgrounds and current issues about each topics. I am so appreciative that I have learned plenty of writing techniques and the information that I searched before writing really broadened my horizon. Moreover, reviewing essays based on feedback realized me that I should improve my grammar, especially for the verb tense. Also, I should also continue working on word choice, and avoid using unfamiliar and uncommon words.
–Jiawen, English 1004, Spring 2014