Yang Wang
WR100 N1
09/04/2014
Initial Self-Assessment
Part1:
In academic writing, I feel I am good at building structures of my essays. When I start writing an essay, I think about structure of the essay: which part should come first, and which should be at the last. It is like an outline, and making an outline, in my view, is really helpful for writing an essay. Before I attend college, I usually start an essay at hazard, and when I find out I got wrong direction in writing my essay, I have to ditch the whole draft and start over. Thus, making outline changes my writing style and lets me write more efficiently. Now I feel I am becoming increasingly professional on building structures/making outlines.
For the skills which I need to work on, is rhetorical techniques and word selection. As we know, there are many types of rhetorical techniques and it is hard to get familiar with all of them. Though I know some of them, I still rarely use those techniques in my essay. So for this part, I need to improve, trying to use them and make my essays more colorful and professional. The other one I should work on is word selection. Because I am not a native-speaker, sometimes, I may use inappropriate words in my essay. Even a simple word can have a deeper meaning that foreigners do not know. Thus, I need to be as quick as possible to get to know when and how I should use the words. Besides, I think I can learn some American proverb and use them in my essay. That will make my essay look better than essays which Chinese students usually write.
Part 2:
In the first semester of my freshman year in BU, I took a computer science class which taught how to build a website. I spent a whole semester to build my own website. At the end of the semester, we needed to design our websites by ourselves, including using different types of font, choosing colors, making proper layout corresponding to our content of the websites. For computer language I also had experience with it because I need to write html pages in order to build and design my website. Besides, I do use PowerPoint because many courses need me to do presentation.
Word Count: 382