Writing is a visible voice that others can see, is a process of knowledge inherited, and also is a way to understand selves and others. That is the idea that I came up with after writing for an engineering class. At the beginning of the class, writing is a process full of boredom and confusion. Although the writing is usually not going to be fun. But, taking a class combined with the writing center has changed me and I feel proud of what I learned in the class. This semester, professor Elisabeth allowed me to extend the assignments, so I can get help and come up with better ideas to finish my assignment. I learned a lot in this course, and I get to know my drawbacks, and I can study to make up for my drawbacks
Figure 1: The visits history to the writing center
This semester, I went to the writing center thirteen times and I met six different tutors to improve my writing. To start going to the writing center is not easy, I need to fight the embarrassment every time before I meet the tutor. I know my writing is bad, so I am afraid to show my work. Even so, professor Elisabeth and tutor Nidhi G. both said “No one is a bad writer, you just need more practice”, and “The best way to improve on vocabulary and sentence structure is to read”. This significantly improved my self-confidence, but I was still embarrassed about my writing. Although all the tutors that I met are nice, there are tutors who give good advice like Nidhi, also tutors do not give advice and do not check papers carefully. Thus, it is a great idea to try other tutors, it helps to have more choice in picking the available time to check the paper with the tutor.
There are many fun and interesting assignments like technical description, and I get to choose my own object. I buy a clock and break it down to see how it works. This satisfies my curiosity, and I learned new things. Also, the reading about making artificial hearts is a great article to prepare my technical description. And there is an assignment full of confusion, which is a rhetorical analysis of lab reports. I know rhetorical analysis, but such as finding the tone, context, and exigence from a lab report is like finding water in a desert. I have no idea how to apply rhetorical analysis to the lab report. Although I got a good grade, I don’t feel like I learned much from the assignment, and it was not fun at all. 
Figure 2: The left side is the instructor’s comment for my rhetorical analysis, and the right is the instructor’s comment for my technical description
In this course, one of the most significant improvements is my sentence structure. For the memo assignment, I went to the writing center and met Nidhi, and she was very nice and gave a lot of advice. I still remember she said, “You are doing very well on the assignment, all you need is to continue working on organizing the sentence structure, people can’t read with a messy sentence structure”. I do feel proud of myself because my professor and many tutors from the writing center like my sentence structure. The second improvement is the citation. I get proficient in the APA citation format, and also understand how to cite images from myself or others. I also get in touch with another type of in-text citation with the author’s name and year separately. Lastly, for an essay, knowing my audience and purpose is the first important thing to writing an essay. The professor mentioned this many times, different audiences will change the style of writing. Although I learn many skills from this course, I don’t have a chance to apply them to other courses; but I will do it in the future.
When I think back on this course, there are still a lot of skills that need to be practiced. The first is to find context and exigence from a scientific article, like the lab report. The second is the description, after looking at instructor comments, I am not doing well on describing an object or image. The third is to understand how to use passive and active voice, this is an error that all of my assignments had. And lastly, read more! Professor Elisabeth gave a lot of readings, but a lot of it I only half-finished. So, reading is what I will do during summer vacation, and this is the only way to improve my grammar and vocabulary, is the only way to be professional in my writing.
Overall, my definition of the theory of writing is changed throughout this course. Writing an essay from boredom and confusion becomes one of the best ways to understand selves and others. But still not going to be fun for me, it just becomes something I would like to learn instead of a subject that I want to avoid. This is one of the most helpful classes I have ever taken. I have enough time to study in detail to finish my assignment. I understand what I need to improve my writing skill instead of memorizing vocabulary, and I will continue working on making up for my drawbacks in writing.
