College Reading Reflection
In English 1A, I've been having trouble with the structure of my essays. It was hard getting used to the rigidity that essay writing demands, and there was a lack of practice in my country when it comes to essay writing. My reading comprehension improved somewhat, and it was thanks to annotating my books that I was able to handle my classes the way that I did. The writings on the margins also help me for the quizzes. Thanks to them, I don't have to go through the whole text over and over again. There was a time in the beginning of the semester that I didn't want to write on my books at all. In the weeks after the first College 1 class, I had to try writing on them, so I did. It was for our topic on Justice and we were reading King's work(Letter from Birmingham Jail). It was very helpful, and honestly, I've taken this practice to heart, now my books are dirty, but they are a lot more helpful now. As I read the text, I focus more on the whole picture. Trying to pick out the things that might help me for the test or whatnot. Before I read the text, I try to familiarize myself with the topic at hand, so that once I start reading, I'm not grasping for straws, unsure of what I'm reading. After reading the text I go back and start annotating the text. It usually takes me a few minutes to go back to my underlined words and highlighted words. Underlined words mean that they need to be reviewed because they are a hard concept and will be useful for the tests, and the highlighted words are parts that I wasn't able to understand the first time around. With this, I'm pretty sure that my reading and writing ability is better than it was at the start of the semester. You can see the difference in the structure of my essays down below.