Making Connect-tions

The McGraw-Hill Connect assignments were on the more tedious side of the Writing 45 class. Once or twice a week, we would be assigned a subject regarding writing, to which we then had to teach ourselves and respond to questions about. Some were able to be done during a lunch break, and others would take well over an hour and a half to complete. Regardless of how long they took, they were without a doubt stimulating and crucial to my academic development.

Here is my report from the connect assignment titled: Practice Session: Run-Ons, Comma Splices, and Mixed Constructions (Sunday, 35 min).

This was definitely one of the easier Connect assignments to complete, seeing that I used 0% resources to complete the assignment and that it only took me 37 minutes to complete. The most challenging concept is seen at the bottom, as I only had a 40% accuracy in this topic. I have typically found myself efficient at proofreading, however this is telling me that when it comes to the subordinating clauses "because," "when," and "where," that I find myself faltering and inefficient at this skill.

While continuing to complete the McGraw-Hill Connect assignment, I became better at this. I now am more confident in correcting sentences with incorrectly placed subjects, especially when they include the notorious "because," when," and "where" clauses. I do believe that I have mastered this skill, and could not have done this without the practice from the Connect assignments. In the future, I will be able to use this skill to better my writing, as these subordinating clauses are typically used in persuasive writing.

Here is a highlight from my Connect assignment titled: Power of Process: Skim Reading Practice: "To Give is Better than to Receive," where I had to respond to three questions in at least three sentences.

I find a little bit of irony and humor here in the fact that my response to the questions was about how I would rather give peer review than to receive it, and that is exactly what the title of the assignment is implying. When it comes to peer review, as discussed in other blog posts, it is more efficient to review somebody's writing than it is to correct your own. This is because of the way we are able to use the criticism we give to our peers to correct our own writing. Not only this, but when we form our writing we often think it is flawless because of the amount of effort we use in forming the essay. However, when other people read the essay they aren't able to see all of the effort that was put into forming it, but instead they only see the product of the effort instead. They can see what the writing looks like without bias, and are able to criticise the paper better than we can, due to the fact that it is not their own writing. Because of this, it has always been deemed as more beneficial for ourselves to give peer review than to receive it, and I will move forward with gratitude knowing that I am aware of this.

Despite being glad that my grammar skills have benefited from the Connect assignments, I felt as happy as this baby while writing this blog post, because I realized that I have completed all of the Connect assignments from this course.