What I learned...

After getting back our assigned homework letter I was actually positively surprised. I considered my text to be a mess and was happy to see that I didn’t do as bad as I thought I did. Still, there were a great deal of mistakes that I didn’t spot when proof-reading the text. Correcting them made me aware of what still needs improvement and practice. 

The first thing I learned from revising my homework is that I tend to (for a lack of better words)  beat around the bush. I have difficulty with bringing what I am trying to say to a point.  This might pose a problem for the upcoming exams because it will be difficult for me to adhere to the given word count. However, some other parts of my text lack explanations because I don’t always express what I am tryin to say clearly. Therefore, I made a resolution to firstly try and keep everything that I write rather short and to secondly formulate things more precisely. Concerning grammar, I need to revise the use of commas. Sometimes I am not entirely sure where to put them in a sentence. It is very important to know the rules concerning commas though, simply because the structure of sentences might get confusing if you put commas in the wrong places.

Resources that helped me correct my mistakes are mostly different kinds of corpora like the “Corpora of Global Web Based English” or “COCA” (http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/) (http://corpus2.byu.edu/glowbe/) as well as my monolingual dictionary. Another online dictionary I like to use is the “Cambridge Dictionary” (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/ ) simply because it also offers a great deal of helpful example sentences and definitions.