Jo 1 12-05-12 Yoonhee Jo ESL 407-H From ESL 407 Class During this semester, through the ESL 407 class, I wrote lots of essays and paragraphs. To learn writing skills how to write essays well, and grammar things, I wrote essays with various subjects such as illustration, comparison and contrast, classification, cause and effect, and persuasive. Through these five essays, I learned lots of skills of writing, and my essays grew up. I think my best essay is the comparison and contrast essay. My comparison and contrast essay’s topic was abortion, and I used contrast method to this topic. I divided the topic about two opinion, which is agreement and opposite. I had three opinions of each agreement and opposite, which was teenagers can give up a lot of things including their futures, they cannot everything by themselves, and teenagers are less controlled than adults for agreement, and life is precious and important, it damage for woman’s physical and mental health, and people must have responsibility whatever they did for opposition. I think, this essay has clear topic, also best and acceptable reasons about the topic. Actually, other essays had only few ideas about the reasons, so sometimes, I tried to rewrote reasons in other words because I did not have enough good ideas, and just spent time. However, about this topic, I had lots of ideas for reasons because I was interested in this topic in ordinary time. If I compare this essay with illustration essay, the illustration essay was worse than contrast essay. The illustration essay was the first essay that we wrote for the assignment, however, the illustration essay’s grammar was the worst, sentence structure was the worst, and languages like word choices was the worst. Because of the worst Jo 2 writing skills, I got bad score for the illustration essay, but I did revision, actually I got more score. Not only this essay, if I read all of essays that I wrote, I think my writing skills grow up. If I see my essays in regular sequences, first of all, I wrote the topic sentences each of paragraphs, and I wrote what I want to tell about each paragraph. When my friend read my essay, she said she did not know what did I wanted to tell about the paragraph. After I heard that, I tried to write topic sentences like these statements first at each paragraph certainly, and through the topic sentences of each paragraph, I wrote what I wanted to tell more exactly. Moreover, I learned about transitional expression in the class, and the professor always emphasize about that. Before I learned about the transitional expression, I just used like first, second, third, and last. However, after I learned about the transitional expression, I tried to use it between sentences and sentences, and paragraph and paragraph, such as moreover, furthermore, in additional, and besides and so on. When I use the transitional expression, the connection of sentences seemed more natural than before I did not use it. Also, before I took this class, when I write essays, I used same word again and again in a paragraph. Although I know only few words, not various words, I did not know that used same words several times in a paragraph was bad thing in the essay. After I figured out that it was bad habit to write the essay, I tried to search the another words with same meaning on the internet, in the dictionary. Actually, I know that I am really bad at grammar. And I also know my grammar has to correct a lot. My grammar was really bad at the first essay, and it was bad at the last essay also. I cannot say that my grammar is better and it looks more better than before, however I am trying to make it better. I got tutoring when I have free time, and I am studying grammar with other grammar book at my free time too. In conclusion, when I think back to whole this semester, I learn many things for write good essays in the ESL 407 class. My first essay was really bad, however I changed and Jo 3 corrected what I missed more and more, my essays looked more complete, also my writing skills grew up. I got many information and knowledge through this class, and I satisfy with this class.