2019/2020 LE blogs

     Today we learned about writing references properly. I didn't know that there are various ways of writing references, and I even didn't know about the four main ways (APA, Harvard, CMS and MLA). Before today's lesson, for websites, I thought we only had to write the title, author, URL and the dates we used those websites. I was shocked when we were told to write a whole lot of information about the references. Fortunately, my teammate showed me a website that automatically creates citations. This saved me because I was in a rush. Although I couldn't find the publisher of the websites even when I went through the web page myself.

     Today we were told about using words from the academic word list. When we checked the first time, most paragraphs' academic word percentage was under 7%. Surprisingly some paragraphs didn't even have any academic words. Using academic words was very difficult since I only know a small number of academic words. Therefore, I had to reuse the same academic word multiple times in a paragraph in order to increase the percentage of academic words.      Then I checked the readability of my paragraphs. They were all about 10 to 11, so I made the readability level 10 paragraphs longer to try to increase the readability level to 11. However, I used a lot of K-1 words so the percentage of academic words decreased. It was also hard to balance the academic word percentage and the readability level. I thought that the only solution to this is to use many sentences that include academic words.

Today, we learned about improving the conclusion paragraph. We realised that we had to use personal pronouns such as "we" in the limitation part. I tried not to this by replacing "we" with "the writers" but that sounds weird. Then we worked on the paragraphs in the body part. We had to edit the paragraphs so there's a nice flow between the three sections in the body paragraphs. It was hard to do this because there were not many things that were related to the topics of the three sections. Also, the most powerful paragraphs in a section had to come in the first or the last part of each section. This made it harder to write a good flow. We are still working on this problem.

  Today, we learned about how to write the bio page on our website.  Mr.Paterson told us that we should change our photos so we look more professional and unified because our photos didn't look like a team's "About Us" page. So our team improved the photos; they have a white background and we turned our bodies sideways a little.  After learning how to write the "About Us" page, I realized that Mr.Paterson's Youtube channel's photo was like this too.   There were some other things that had to improve. Firstly, I asked the readers a question in the first sentence of my part. Mr.Paterson said that asking a question in an academic essay was not good, so I changed that sentence. Secondly, we had to use more academic words in the paragraphs to sound professional. Thirdly, we realised that there was only one sentence for the story part. We improved this but there are only three sentences so I am unsure if that is enough.   I hadn't realized before ...

   Today we learned how to improve the introduction part of the brochure. When we gave feedbacks of the hook, our partner team gave us a nice comment on our hook. However, I thought it was somewhat boring.  After thinking about it a lot, I thought that we should leave a question for the readers so they will have to read the brochure to know the answer. Therefore, I want to change it to "TGUISS is an IB school, has a great English curriculum and students have a lot of freedom, but there are things that affect our learning every day."   Then we improved our thesis statement. Our team's thesis statement was awful because it sounded like a demand. We didn't provide a summary of the essay and it didn't include the topic and reasons of the claim.  After altering the thesis statement, the new thesis statement has a topic, claim and the reasons so I think it is better.

   Today Mr.Paterson introduced a very useful command to us. If we press control and F at the same time, a search box appears at the top of the page. Many people might have known this before, but it was a surprising discovery for me. This command worked on other websites too, so I want to use them for researching quickly.     We also learned about phrasal verbs and redundant phrases. We were told we should reduce them. Before I learned this I thought longer essays were better because there will be more information. However, now we are told to have short sentences. I thought that the most important thing was the quality of the essay.    When we were told to shorten the sentence about the ferry, our team struggled to summarize it, so I just wrote it as if I were the author. To my surprise, Mr.Paterson said our one had the closest meaning to the original sentence. After I saw the answer, I thought that we need to expand our vocabulary in order to...

 Today we learned how to write a five-paragraph essay. I didn't know a good format for writing an essay so learning this was very helpful. In this format, some parts were similar to what we learned in other English classes. For example, we learned in the other class that in the introduction paragraph, we should include a hook sentence and the main point of the essay. Though, we didn't learn (or I might have forgotten) that we should have three body paragraphs.  Then I realized I only had two topics: the formation of the desks & chairs and the quality of the desks & chairs. So Instead of writing the quality of the desks & chairs, I want to split the desks part and the chairs part to create an additional section. I'm going to write about the problems and the solutions of the desks & chairs in each section, so I thought if one section contained both the problems and the solution, the paragraph would become too long.  Mr.Paterson said we should use Lextuto...

 First, we were told that most of us had too few movements. So Mr.Paterson told us about mapping the room. This method connects the content of the story and the movement, so the audience subconsciously remembers the presentation. If I'm going to map the room, I would first move towards the corridor when I'm talking about the formation of the desks, and when I'm talking about the actual chairs & desks, I will move towards the computer. When I'm going to end my part, I want to be on the computer side.  Second, we were told about changing the slides. I thought we shouldn't have a signal for changing the slides because if we do the audience will get distracted. Therefore I was surprised when Mr.Paterson said we should have a signal even if we say "next slide please". Also, we were told the next speaker shouldn't change the slides. However, our group did this so we'll be aware next time.  Last, we fixed the infographic so that there's more c...