reflective journal 2

REFLECTIVE jOURNAL


WEEK 2


This week we studied strategies for effective reading in the reading class and discussed academic culture in more detail in writing class.

Some of the strategies towards effective reading are skimming through a book to get an idea of the concept, guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words by looking at the whole sentence to find the role of the word in a sentence and scanning for details.
I always use a dictionary for new words, and I do write my new words in the book, so that I can remember them, go over them and understand the meaning to be able to recognise them in a future and confidently use them in my writing.
I do not know how effective my reading would be If I was guessing the meaning of the words. I like to fully understand what I read.

In writing skills class we explored academic text and learned some of the features of it. We look at the difference between academic and non-academic text. We learned that academic text is always logical, rational and impersonal. Also, in academic text claims have to be supported by evidence and facts need to be precise, while in non-academic text that is not necessary. Non –academic text can carry personal opinion, but academic text is always impersonal. The difference between two are easily recognisable.
The other feature of academic text we discussed was descriptive and analytical approach to academic text.
I found this not clear enough, because the text used in the book to show differences between texts were taken from economics and management subjects hard to understand. I found it a bit confusing, although I knew that descriptive refers to describing and analytical to breaking something in parts and analysing it, I had to spend more time in reading texts again to clarify it.
If we had more time in class to discuss academic text in more detail It would have been much clearer.

In this week journal, I focused my attention to reading and writing classes as I believe that they carry important foundation skills and strategies towards writing academically successful assay.