ENGLCOM may have been boring in some cases but it was definitely not a waste of time. The new competencies I have learned and the competencies I have improved on after I took up ENGLCOM will help me in my future stay in DLSU-M in passing and acing other courses I will take, especially those with thesis requirements.
The competencies I have learned or acquired in ENGLCOM are proper documentation, writing parenthetical citations, making notecards, and avoiding plagiarism. Through ENGLCOM I have learned how to do proper documentation and why it is important. If you are writing, documentation can give your papers credibility and verification through your sources; it also shows respect to your sources and is a sign of intellectual honesty of you, the writer. The next lesson I have learned from ENGLCOM is parenthetical citations. Before, I did not know what the numbers in a parenthetical citation meant, now I know that it is the date of publication of the paper. There are different parenthetical citations for different types of sources. Following the correct type of parenthetical citation for each source can help make things less confusing especially if you are using sources from the internet. The 3rd new lesson for me was notecards. It was the first time I learned about notecards even though some of my friends say they already learned it in highschool. I probably missed that lesson back then. Notecards gives support and strength to your papers, as well as documentation for it. It contains the article, sentence, etc.., you would like to use in your paper and also the information where you got your sources. The last lesson I learned is the proper way to avoid plagiarism. I thought that to avoid plagiarism, you only have to change one word in the sentence or make a little difference in its sequence. Now that I took up ENGLCOM, I know that I was wrong and more importantly, I was corrected. To avoid plagiarism, you could either paraphrase or summarize the sentences from your source and cite your source properly.
The competencies I have improved after I have taken up ENGLCOM are inferring, writing, skimming, scanning, researching, summarizing, paraphrasing, note-taking, listening, and making a thesis statement. I have also developed further my parallelism, subject-verb agreement, grammar and spelling, diction, coherence, tense-shift, and transition.
I am now better at summarizing and paraphrasing because I have learned to how to do it properly without plagiarizing. It is important because it protects me from un-deliberately stealing from my sources, thus it also protects me from the law because stealing is a crime. The bar on my researching skill has been raised. I learned that it is more effective to use internet sources that have its author and to avoid using sites such as Wikipedia that consistently change and does not have an author.
In my opinion, the most important competency I have improved after I took up ENGLCOM is confidence in writing. I have improved my writing in terms of connecting my ideas to the readers and giving a clear picture of what I am writing about. Creative writing is not easy. It is hard to make people enjoy what you are writing; this was one of my challenges when I was taking up ENGLCOM. The introduction should make the readers want to read your paper and give them a preview of it. The thesis statement should give a clear meaning of what you are writing about and what your main idea is. The body should have the content of what you are writing. The conclusion should be conclusive and gives an impact to your readers. It is not enough to just have sources and correct grammar, spelling, structure, and documentation for your paper, but you also have to put your own ideas and make your paper interesting, worth-reading, and unique. These are the things I have learned from ENGLCOM.
Because of ENGLCOM, I have seen flaws in my works, as well as heard the evaluation of other on it. I know now what do to on how to make my writing better. There is still much to learn but the way I write before I took up ENGLCOM and the way I write after I took up ENGLCOM have big differences and improvements. My expectations were satisfactorily met.
