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Wenqing (Ary) Tang

Professor Marie Webb

Ling12

03 June 2019

Language Self-Study Reflection

In ​Language Power: Tutorials for Writers​, written by Dana R. Ferris, there are many

useful guidelines for writing papers. These tutorials are divided in three parts: mastering the

basics, developing academic language and style, and tackling problem areas, which can be

employed by writers in all different levels from beginners to veterans. Every topic has detailed

instructions about what does a writer need to know about this aspect of writing, followed by

practices that can ensure your better understanding, and ask you to apply the knowledge into

your own works. The four tutorials I chose were phrases, clauses, and sentence types; word form;

wordy sentences; and inaccurate word choice. From my perspective, all of these tutorials are

helpful because the explanations are clear and practices are not too difficult but do require you to

think about them carefully.

The first tutorial I did, phrases, clauses, and sentence types, allowed me to more clearly

divide a sentence according to structures, including verb phrases, prepositional phrases, noun

phrases, etc. Thus, I could check if there is any run-on sentences or comma splices in my paper.

Also, the applying practice in this tutorial let me find out that I tend to use more compound

sentences and complex-compound sentences, which sometimes make my writing more wordy

and hard to understand. With the second tutorial, word form, which is recommended by the

professor, I learned when to use the correct part of speech of a word. The third tutorial I did was
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wordy sentences, which could be called as the most important one for my writing skills. As I

stated previously, I have a lot of repetitive and wordy expression in my paper, so this tutorial

helped me break down my long sentences and make them clearer. I also learned to reduce

nominalizations and limit “it is” and “there be” constructions in my writing. For my last tutorial,

inaccurate word choice, I learned to use collocational dictionary to look up word phrases because

although some words might be similar in meaning, they might not replace each other when put

together with other words.

In summary, through this guidebook I gained deeper knowledge about basic grammar

that I used to be uncertain about, and discovered more problems appeared in my current writings.

It also gives me a direction to keep working in my future path of writing because now I realize

that real problems with my papers are repetitive and inaccurate expressions rather than basic

grammar.