Reflection of the writing and editing process

I would say I have learnt many things that were taught since the first tutorial till now. Firstly, I learnt the way to structure a reflection. Before this course, I had no clue on how to go about writing a reflection from scratch. Secondly, I realised the common grammatical mistakes that I have made over and over again throughout my academic years. Lastly and most essentially, I acquired greater understanding on structuring an essay and a summary, which is extremely useful in helping me in other modules as well. These skills will serve me good in the long run as they are relevant in various situations that may arise in the future.

For academic writing, I improved my content through the recognition of the need to create clear and concise topic sentences. Furthermore, language is less of an issue now as I have cut down on my common grammatical errors. The structure of the academic writing has improved the greatest as I am now clear on the basic outline every piece of academic writing should possess.

It would be great if we can continue working on writing outlines for essays as I feel it is a good exercise to practice critical thinking and evaluation on more topics of discussion. In my opinion, my weakness lies in my ability to write good topic sentences. More often than not, I spend a lot of time on thinking of ways to shape these topic sentences.

For the comments on the summary and reader response, I felt that I had made proper changes for every comment that was given. The comments given were very clear on the mistakes that I had made and changes were done without much pondering over the correctness of those changes.

For the accuracy of my self-grading, I would say I was accurate because of the similar grades I scored for each section. The challenge was to gauge a mark for content because it seems subjective to the reader.

The effectiveness of the audio and written feedback given on for assignments was amazing. I was surprised at how well the whole video was able to transmit a clear explanation because it was a first experience. More importantly, the audio feedback actually acts as a complement for the written feedback. Without it, the usefulness of the written feedback would be severely undermined. The written feedback might even make us more confused as the written comments were only giving a general representation of what needs to be corrected. We can also repeat the playback of the video if we were unsure on a certain comment mentioned, at our own pace. Therefore, on the overall, the audio and written feedback is a good way to get feedback. I would definitely benefit from such movie format file feedback in my other courses.

Changes according to Ms Misty's comments

1) "At the moment" refers to now and ongoing. It is incorrect for me to use "at the moment" in this sentence of my reflective writing as it should be used along present continuous tense.

eg. I am being taken aback at the moment.

"At that moment" refers to the period belonging to the past. Thus, I should be using " at that moment" instead.


2) It should be "did" because the context is in the past tense. " I told myself..." shows that the action of telling myself has happened in the past


3) My 2nd part of the sentence did not show any direct relationship with the 1st part.

edited: " As consultation meetings with her became more frequent, I had to improve my work ethic so as to make full use of the time slots."


4) "she gave me" has already indicated that the "life lessons" was from her. The article "the" is used to refer to something that has already been mentioned or that we have knowledge of, even if it has not been mentioned before.

I should be writing either

1) will always be reminded of the life lessons she gave me
2) will always be reminded of her life lessons

Reflective writing

During my secondary school days, I was an unmotivated student. In my secondary 3 Mathematics examination, I scored a single digit point. Upon the receipt of my result, though I felt a little upset, I had already expected it as I knew I did not prepare for the examination. My teacher then pulled me out of class during lesson to speak to me regarding the matter. 

She said, “How do you feel when your classmates are easily scoring A grades, while you are still struggling to cope with this subject? Do you want this result for your ‘O’ levels? It will follow you the rest of your life.” I was taken aback at the moment by the impact of her words. It was a moment of realization. I told myself that I do not want to be an underachiever again. From that day onwards, my work ethic improved drastically, with frequent meetings with her for consultation.

In the end, I achieved my A grade for Mathematics for ‘O’ levels. Till today, I am grateful to her for picking me up from the academic slump, and will always be reminded of her life lessons she gave me. I truly believe her priceless teachings will serve me good throughout my life, in whatever relevant situation that will arise.