Your Experiences With Writing 101

The name is Jagdish Vasvani. Currently majoring in computer engineering at the American University of Sharjah, I aspire to be run a business in this field. A few preferred hobbies are swimming, playing football and sleeping, after I joined AUS. The topic given for this essay by professor Craven is “Your experiences with writing 101”. Briefly, it was a radical change from high school writing which included letter to the editor or an email, to university level writing that consists of writing five paragraph long essays. Initially, most of the students seemed clueless about the subject’s guidelines and tasks. However, with the help of the professors, most of us managed to do well and gain immense knowledge about the subject.

Writing a five paragraph essay in two hours is just as challenging as it sounds. Apparently, this was the task given for the final exam of writing 101 in the American University of Sharjah. For most of the high school graduates, writing
seemed like an easy subject for them. Little did they know, writing was the only subject that would shatter their dreams of achieving a 4.0 GPA. However, its significance is later realized when the engineering students have to write a thesis for their PhD or the business students for their management reports. As a freshman majoring in engineering, writing 101 has been helpful for making NGN 110 reports.

Writing 101 consists of numerous challenges. A few of them were to write a compare and contrast essay, formal academic critique, argumentative and some more. The first challenge given by the professor was a compare and contrast essay. This type of essay writing improved the decision making skills of an individual. For example, if a person wants to set up a business, he or she is in a dilemma whether to set up an e business or the normal traditional business. Here, a compare and contrast session with oneself will help that individual to choose a better and more efficient option. Argumentative essay, on the other hand, was more like a debate. The writer of an argumentative essay is required to support their respective point with the help of a few facts, statistics and their opinions. However, the writers had to support a few points that were against their point or opinion. Nevertheless, the points stated to support the argument by the writer should have been comparatively reasonable and convincing.

Another challenge faced by the students was to write a formal academic critique.
In other words, a review of an essay or an article. It consists of 5 components: the introduction paragraph which gives some information about the author; summary of the essay, a brief overview of the essay; evaluation of the essay, the fallacies pointed out in the essay; the response paragraph, contains the opinions of the critic towards the essay; and finally the conclusion, a suggestion from the critic to the author of the essay. The critique written could be either positive or negative. In comparison to the other types of essays, writing an academic critique was an easier and boring task. There is no brainstorming involved in this type of writing which made this piece of writing facile yet uninteresting. Also, the respect given to critics by the society or famous people is pretty less. However, their reviews helps the writers improvise their writing skills and hence providing the public with a good piece of writing to
read.

As we have seen, the students of writing 101 have confronted a lot of crucial challenges. From writing 102, the students expect to gain more knowledge in this subject and excel in their assignments with the help of their previous and present knowledge. Also, the work load from this subject is expected to be lesser than in writing 101. Personally, writing 101 was a not a high scoring subject for me. An eighty plus in this subject was a bliss. Nevertheless, I learnt a lot from my mistakes and made sure I wouldn't repeat them from next time onwards.