Week 9: EC Connect Practice Assignment Reflection

After completing the Week 9 Extra Credit Practice Assignment on Connect, I received my accuracy report:

Breakdown of Week 9 Practice Grammar Assignment

I could have definitely taken my time as I finished the assignment in 36 minutes. I have to admit that when I was completing the assignment, I was not as focused as I could be and rushed through it. As a result, some careless errors were made, especially for the subject-verb agreement topic. I believe I have a strong understanding of the subject-verb agreement topic, so I do not have to spend too much time worrying about it as I write my essay. However, I did learn through my mistakes for the tricky neither/nor situations.

For example, both sentences are correct:

---“Neither Amanda nor Diane is present in class today.”

---“Neither Amanda nor her friends are present in class today.”

For this situation, some pointers that I learned was

1. You know if the verb is singular or plural by focusing on the noun closest to the verb (the second noun mentioned).

1a. “Diane” is a singular noun, so the verb “is” is used.

1b. The noun “her friends” is plural, so the verb “are” is used.

2. When both a singular noun and plural noun are used in a sentence, the plural noun should be put last.

Knowing my go-to language in essays, I often use neither/nor, so I will undoubtedly remember these rules.

For the remaining topics (fused/comma splices, pronoun-antecedent agreement, and dangling modifiers), I can confidently say that I mastered them. Fused and run-on sentences are easy to fix and spot because two independent clauses would be joint together without a conjunction word or punctuation. Comma splices are similar to fused sentences but there is a comma in between the two independent clauses, which is still grammatically incorrect. Pronoun-antecedent agreement comes naturally to me. As long as I understand the context of the sentence, I can pinpoint which noun the verb is referring to. Lastly, for dangling modifiers, I know to locate the main noun of the sentence and decide if the modifier/dependent clause matches the noun. If the noun and modifier do not match or make sense contextually, then the modifier is misplaced or dangling.

Overall, I thought the Connect practice grammar sessions polished my skills which gave me a smoother revising process. The sessions refreshed several grammar rules that I specifically remembered learning in middle school and sixth grade. When I repeatedly picked the wrong answer choices, a module would pop-up, providing a crash course on that topic. In addition, because I am a native English speaker, I pick choices that sound “right,” but sometimes I do not know why it is correct. A topic that I encountered this problem was the article use with “an,” “a”, and “the.” The sessions allow me to read more into the topic or lead me to conduct my own research on Google.

There were other Connect practice sessions that helped me with summarizing/paraphrasing, source integration, and research planning. Unlike the grammar-focused sessions, I was less confident with these sessions before completing them. However, the summarizing/paraphrasing immensely prepared me for the annotation assignments where I had to summarize chapters in the reading. I found the “Developing a Research Plan & Evaluating Sources” very helpful as it gave me background knowledge of how to approach the Historical Context Project. It taught me how to easily identify key terms of my question/topic for the research process. It also distinguished popular and scholarly sources. From that, I made sure to incorporate both in my essays as both have their own advantages.

Connect Self-Assessment

Ultimately, each of the sessions, whether research skill-building or grammar, all benefited me as a writer, reader, and researcher. However, as shown by the screenshot of the Self-Assessment, I believe the sessions were more of a review and refresher.