When writing papers, some of my favorite tools to revise, draft, brainstorm, polish, and gather
information from articles, were first given to me in this class. Although I have taken many English
classes in high school, and elementary schools, I feel that I have improved on my writing strategies this
semester. My favorite tool I learned was for active reading. I struggle retaining information when I read
and so I already was reading articles twice through. But what I learned in class was to highlight
important information and annotate in different colors. One color the first time I read, and another color
the second time I read. This helps me see other information that I could have missed when I read the
article the first time.
Another active reading strategy I find very helpful is finding words that I do not understand and
defining them. It is so easy to be uninterested in an article when I cannot make sense of the wording.
Once I can understand words that I thought were too scholarly for me, I can become more interested in a
piece of work because I actually know what the author is saying. Another strategy that I love to use when
writing is reading out loud. Sometimes when I write a paper it makes more sense in my head than it
actually does on paper. When I stop for a minute to read what I have written out loud, I am able to see
mistakes that I have made. Reading my paper out loud also helps me to make sense from what I want to
say and what I actually write. I believe that I will take these tools with me to other courses especially with
reading and writing lab reports. It is easy to just write down the information that I have to in a lab report
but writing it scholarly is harder because of how dense the information can be. These tools will help me
to write lab reports and retain and understand information in other classes better.
