Amanda Grumke Obstacles

When a person begins writing they have many obstacles that they must overcome. Some face issues with creating well-written sentences, writing thesis sentences and others face issues with expanding their vocabulary. It can be difficult to do and takes a great deal of practice and patience. A student, Amanda Grumke, faced these same obstacles as she began writing. At the beginning of her English Composition 1 class, her writing landed at a very low level. After a semester of practice, she has made improvements. Amanda has improved her sentence structures, transitional words, and improved points of view. At the beginning of Amanda’s essays, she used very basic sentences. Now she is using a mix of sentence structures. She struggled with the correct usage of commas. In essay 2 page 2, Amanda wrote: “As the silver chain rotates I think of the chrome hubcaps rotating….” In this sentence, she is missing the comma between rotates and I. In her later essays, Amanda has made a great deal of improvement. In essay 3 she wrote, “When it comes time for the mothers to deliver, I will be able to provide medical attention.” This sentence shows a good usage of commas. She remembered to place a comma to connect the two thoughts. Furthermore, in journal 9, Amanda focused on improving her sentences that obtained passive voice. She really struggles with this. In most
Several of the key problems that she faced with writing transitional sentences came back to not having strong transition words. In essay one, the transitional words that were commonly used included first, typically, and now. These words are at a low level of writing. After her first essay, it is easily noticed that she has worked hard at finding better transitional statements. In essay two, she used the words although, furthermore, and in addition to her transitional words. These are more proper to use at the college level