Short Essay about Reflection
At this point, I can say that my writing skills are getting better and better, I have been able to master sentence flow and a bit of writing framework. My paragraphs have shown a continuous flow from one to another. There is a close relationship between activities running at one point and those that occur in the next.
For, example, there is flow of ideas from paragraph one to the second paragraph. From the first paragraph, I was able to link the vice of corruption in Illinois with its description in paragraph two. Other than its description, I was also able to give the different types of corruption, which actually shows a smooth flow from one idea to another. This is the major strength that I have been able to achieve so far, other minor strengths are, spelling, tenses, and although this is experienced, I also have a weakness is skipping words in a sentence, in paragraph one for example, I said ‘…….sell the U.S.
senate seat which held by President Barack Obama……’. I skipped the word ‘was’ between ‘which’ and ‘held’. In page three paragraph one, I also skipped some words, I said ‘Regulations and authorizations are the other factors that also corruption’ probably, I would have used the words ‘encourages’ or ‘leads to’ between ‘also’ and ‘corruption’ in the last part. My instructor also identified these, in page two the fourth paragraph, ‘….an anti globalization movement that may resolve in using….
‘ I had skipped the word ‘that’ there are others similar mistakes I also realized that I had made. When I went through my peer’s comments, I felt encouraged, from the first comment ‘….this topic is worthy of attention…’ this shows that my choice of topic is good. I was able to identify a problem that is affecting the nation and if every individual gets concerned about the vice, it can be solved effectively. I was able to take a good opinion on how corruption can be stopped; this is according to his comment ‘your solution is appropriate to start curbing corruption’. Compared to my initial work, I can realize that there are many improvements; the number of mistakes identified by my peer and my instructor are very few.
My peer identified long sentences in my project. For example, in page two the last paragraph ‘This happens for instace, when a worker in a company, earning a small salary, if given a chance and be told to look for some cash and give out to someone who can help him or her increase the salary, that worker is tempted to look for every means to get the cash and be a part and parcel of those people contributing to corruption’. This sentence is long and probably, I should have used a full stop at some point or changes it totally. She also identified grammatical errors like ‘recites’ instead of ‘resides’ and ‘this’ instead of ‘these’. These have helped me to focus on sentence construction and parts of speech. I actually understand all the comments that she made and I think she should have also considered checking on my format, there was no comment to show if my format is correct or not.
From the instructor’s assessment, I felt I have had an improvement in writing skills, the mistakes pointed out are few, and I can effectively correct them. I had misplaced words like ‘…what are the benefits of fighting….’ ‘are’ was misplaced and it should come between ‘benefits’ and ‘of’. I made a lot of mistake in citations; citations within text were not well made. I did not use a comma to separate the author and the page of the book.
This is a mistake in all my in text citations. I also made this mistake in the sources. The MLA format was to be used; I however, used the APA format. In the first source, I did not start with the surname, which should actually be the case. From the instructor’s comments, I could comfortably identify the errors and was able to correct them with clarity. I did not get any comment that I could not understand and I am therefore comfortable with the comments.
From the instructor’s comments, and those I identified, there are several things I can do to make it more effective. First, I will use the right citations; instead of (Bhattarai 81) I will insert a comma between the author name and the page number, that is, (Bhattarai, 81). This is applicable in the in text citations only. For the sources at the end of the essay, I will change the format to MLA such that, ‘Harris Godfrey. (2003) Corruption: How to Deal with Its Impact on Business and Society.
Florida: The Americas Group’ becomes ‘Harris, Godfrey. Corruption: how to deal with its impacts on business and society. Florida: The American group, 2003. I willl also do this to the rest of the sources. Other than this, I will also correct the mistake I did in sentence construction. Long sentences tend to lose meaning as one continues to read it.
I will therefore change the sentence I noted before to; ‘This for instance happens when a low salaried worker is asked to bribe in order to get a salary increment. In this case, this worker is promoting corruption in his place of work if he heeds the request’. This sentence is short and very clear compared to the initial one. This will therefore make a person interested in reading my work. From my peer’s comment, paragraph three does not flow well from paragraph two.
To correct this mistake, I will restructure paragraph four so that it best fits paragraph two. It is in this paragraph that I gave the types of corruptions, this will actually match well will the descriptions in the second paragraph. I will also shift the third to be the fourth paragraph and this correctly matches paragraph five. From these, there will be a good flow of ideas and simplicity in understanding.In order to capture the attention of many audiences, I will include questions in my work.
The audience will give a personal answer to the questions. a question for example ‘if a person promises to give you a job if only you give him some money, as an activist against corruption, and still want the job, what step will you take?’ this is a challenging question that will leave the audience with several options to choose from. I will also use symbolism, using symbols like “sword” to mean corruption will have a great impact on audience, it will show how dangerous corruption is. Comparing with a sword shows that it is deadly and can cause a lot of harm to those who are involved either directly or indirectly. Having such ideas will therefore capture the attention of the audience.
To capture more relevance on the extent of corruption that has been experienced, I will incorporate visuals like charts. There are several known instances of corruption in Illinois. Taking the number of identified and recorded crimes of corruption by different people and plotting it in a graph with time will help to show its trend. It will be clear in expressing whether it has been decreasing or increasing with time. Otherwise, the other parts of my writing were suitable and therefore making these improvements will improve it and will be more appealing to the audience.
