English 5B: Improving My Writing

As English 5B progresses through the year, an aspect of this course that has helped me improve my writing. I have always struggled with writing but English 5A helped me with starting my papers, as rather English 5B helps me improve my writing and show me how to further develop my ideas. This course has helped me with showing me how to evaluate criteria by using a blog, identify how to make my topic clearer by using annotated bibliographies, and having activities to review my work such as sentence structure, worshipping and one-on-one conferences.

At the start of this semester, we started talking about evaluations in order to prepare us for our first writing assignment. An evaluation is making a judgment about a certain topic. An example of

Annotated Bibliographies allowed me to set up my thoughts and elaborate on the sources I wanted to incorporate into my writing. At first, I was rather confused by them. I did not find a need to them or think they would be helpful for my writing and just a waste of time and I was wrong. Annotated bibliographies helped my writing by taking my time in the research aspect of my writing and actually reading the content of my research. In an annotated bibliography you wrote the citation, a summary, how you would use it in our paper and optionally take quotes from the passage. I was able to have the citation ready if I chose to use this article. The summary allowed me to understand the article which was easier to use when writing my essay because when I would read the summary I was able to remember valuable information within the passage. The annotated bibliographies had a section asking, how I would use this in my paper. That was the most helpful for me. I struggle often with how to start my writing so being able to explain how I would use it made it easier to actually use it in my

I was able to identify different sentences in my paper in order to make my topic clearer. Having to go through my paper and be able to identify each sentence as either a simple, compound or complex could help my reader understand the topic better and improve my writing. Sentence structure is able to guide my reader through the paper and signal what's important. It helps vary my writing so it doesn't look the same and help me focus on certain words and ideas throughout my paper. Within sentence structure having that workshop in the class where we talked about where we place a comma was really helpful. I was able to go throughout my paper and take commas out because I would tend to use them too much and fix my run on sentences. When I would have an idea I would just write it down without carefully evaluating and making sure it makes sense