Explain Why I Chose Writing 101

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There are a few reasons as to why I took Writing 101. First and foremost, it’s a requirement; second, I hate writing and, even more, I hate classes solely judged on my writing exclusively. I was the kid in elementary school that didn’t know the difference between a verb and a noun. The third reason I took writing 101 is I took all the other required classes for my associates first, and saved this class for last. Before I took this class, I had some writing experience, mostly based on history research projects or essay questions during midterms and finals that were really opinion based; no APA formatting required or sources available to quote as the tests were closed book. As much as I have dreaded taking this class, and the math class I’m about …show more content…
After this class though I started to start the assignment at the beginning of the week to give me time to think, organize, and do research. Sometimes only working on the assignment for an hour or so to get it started, the rest would fall into place naturally towards the end of the week, and I would have a finished product before the essay was due. It helped getting graded and feedback on a first draft to identify my mistakes and gave me time to work on the final cut and know what I did wrong. Also, it allowed me in the future to identify these mistakes before I submitted them on my rough draft. My first essay was rattled with “RUN-ON!!!!” remarks from the teacher, and by the last assignment I think I was down to only one RUN-ON Comment. With the assignments about punctuation and using a semi-colon I could Identify long sentences and either end them, or use …show more content…
I constantly went back into lessons to look how to format a reference, and all the rules that went along with number of authors, dates or no dates, and so on. To overcome this, I relied on google to find an online citation webpage, and I used the UMUC Library. On the UMUC Library when you clicked on a title, there was a link to show you how to reference the source and even let you pick different formats. The other tool I used when I wasn’t using a UMUC Library source was http://www.citationmachine.net/apa/cite-a-website, that made it very easy to reference a website with what given information was available. For the citation website, you would simply insert the web page you needed to reference, and it would pull all the data it could find to create a citation. After that it would allow you to go in and add additional information it couldn’t find but you as the reader could see; for example, an author or date in a column or drop-down menu. If you had multiple citations it would also arrange them alphabetically. From using this web tool, it provided me with the proper format for citations, and allowed me to quickly identify when a citation was