Writing 101 is the first college level writing class I have ever taken. After I decided to enroll into UMUC, I enrolled concurrently into Humanities 100 and Writing 101. While juggling a full-time job and a two-year-old at home, I figured I should start off with what I considered to be easy, introductory courses. Over the past eight weeks, I have gained considerable knowledge in both courses, but Writing 101 has really challenged me academically. When I began Writing 101, I was not familiar with much of the course material and my writing skills were not developed; through the assignments and learning resources, I have now developed the skill set to develop thesis statements and complete coherent essays. In week one of Writing 101, the class was introduced to the writing process for college level writing. We focused on reading and note taking strategies to help assist us with starting and finishing the writing process. We also learned how to identify and correct sentence fragments. Our first writing assignment was due in week …show more content…
We watched a video walkthrough of a student’s ”Cause or Effect” sample paper. This walkthrough really helped because it taught some great techniques to help us create a strong thesis statement and strong supporting points. I found that the “Cause or Effect” essay was the most challenging essay of the course. With a minimum of 1500 words and 6 sources, including 3 from scholarly journals, I found myself struggling to complete this assignment. I worked on this essay for a total of three days. Eventually, I was able to develop a strong thesis with good supporting points and an overall strong essay. The feedback I received on the assignment was very encouraging but also very shocking, as I did not think I did very well. For grammar, we learned about parallel structures and how to use them. We also completed interactive exercises and took a graded quiz on