This class have been very helpful and was a reminder on how to write in an academic way. It helped me regain the structure of an academic paper and picked on my grammar mistakes and learned how to fix them. I was always worried about forgetting how to write in an academic structure because as a student majoring in Engineering, I am only writing technical papers that is way different than normal writing. It has its own structures and rules. Taking this class was a gain of confidence and a reminder of all the things that I have forgotten. I liked how there was a verity of papers that are required in this course and they require different guidelines and ways to think. This had made me think outside the box. This class improved my writing skills because I got to write papers that their idea was different every time and was different than what I wrote before; in my other writing classes that I took during the International English Center. I Enjoyed presenting with my home group mates. It was nice to work in groups and share different ideas together. This helped me overcome my shyness. At the beginning of the semester I was shy. Today when I presented, I felt more comfortable presenting to the class because I got used to these wonderful classmates and professor. The most paper that I have enjoyed writing was the literacy narrative because I got to share with others my passion in cooking. I am thankful for this lovely semester!
Category: Uncategorized
Chocolate
I wanted to talk about my favorite chocolate candies. I love all kinds of chocolate, white, milk, or dark. But my most favorite are the milk and white chocolate. Mostly I accept most milk chocolate brands. However, the only brand that I like that makes white chocolate is the “Milky Bar” by Nestle. This chocolate reminds me of my childhood. My grandfather used to give us Milky Bars after the family lunch gathering. I love it so much. I always eat the borders of the bar and lastly eat the middle picture. It so milky and milts quickly in your mouth. My most favorite milk chocolate is “Lion” by Nestle. It has rice krispies mixed with caramel and crispy wafers. It is so chewy and delicious. My second favorite milk chocolate is Kinder Bueno. This chocolate is delicious in every bite you take. It is so creamy from the inside and crispy from the outside. I am not sure what the filling is made of, but I think it has some hazelnut. Talking about hazelnut, I love chunks of hazelnut mixed with milk chocolate. My favorite brands that offers this wonderful mix is Cadbury and Milka brands. I honestly love all Milka flavors they offer. They make almost a mix of most famous brands such as they mix their chocolate with Oreos and Chip Ahoy. I can’t get bored of chocolate. They are the most cheerful things to eat, when you’r sad, happy, and hungry. I can’t imagine the world without chocolate!
Things I want to Learn
I would like to learn how to write technical writing even though I am a senior right now. I still feel that I am not good at writing. Even though I wrote technical writing papers a lot. I do not tend to do will in them. l also want to learn how to use better phases or word in my writings that would make my writings strong. I would also like to know how to scan very quickly with scientific articles to go the main point an idea so I would not spend a lot of time finding or reading in not helpful information. This would help with my future career or even now in my senior design class because in that class we do a lot of research to figure things up and sometimes I don’t not tend to do that very quickly and it takes a lot of my time. I also want to learn how to write a resume for my future job and know the things that would make a good resume. I wish I have known these things or learned them before getting to my senior classes because most of these classes requires the students to figure out everything by their own without the help of the professor. This sometimes tend to stress me out and it is very harder for, since English is not my first language. I would also like to learn how to know how to distinguish between a good paper or article than a bad one.
Discourse Community: Siblings
As for the discourse community I belong to, which I thought of is siblings, since I consider to be a sibling to my siblings. I have an older sister called Reem and she is 26 years old. I also have two younger brothers Ali and Mohammed. Ali’s age is 17 and Mohammed’s age is 11. We all share the same goals most of the time specially when it comes to our parents. We all want to make our parents happy and proud by doing good in school and behave between each other. Since we live in the same house, part of our intercommunications is when we eat lunch, dessert in the afternoons, and at dinner. We usually talk in these times in the table during lunch and dinner and in the living room during dessert. We usually talk about our day in school. Even now when I am away, we still communicate through family group chat. We give feedback to each other, when we needed to compliment each other, when my brothers needed help understanding their assignments, or when they do poorly on a test. They would ask either my sister or me to help them understand what went wrong. I usually also take feedback from them or info about my parents, if they were not at home and my brothers seemed to know where they are.
For the genre, from our legal documentation we all carry the same middle name and last name we all considered siblings, were we use those documentation such as our ID to speak as a legal gradient, when my younger brother needs that in school or hospital, and the same thing with my sister. As for our lexis we do use some phrases or nicknames between each other that my parents don’t know of, if we want to send a face-to-face message to one another while everyone present, we use these phrases so no one would understand what we are saying. As for hierarchy of members we do have difference in ages and different positions when it comes to our parents. My sister goes first, me, Ali, then Mohammed in age wise. Mohammed is the youngest and he seemed to get what he wants when it comes to my mom. Ali is the oldest boy, so he is considered the man of the house when my parents are away. My sister is the one that gets anything she wants and do what she wants, since she is the older one and the first child being born. I tend to be the one who fix problems and disagreements in the house, the engineer, and my dad’s favorite.
Kuwait
The Avenues Mall 
Opera House 
360 Mall 
Al-Shaheed Park 
Marina Mall
As I mentioned before, I am from Kuwait. I am going to share with you an overview about Kuwait and some famous places to visit. Kuwait is a very small country and its economy is based on petroleum production. It is very modern nowadays and it has very famous places that people from all around the world like to visit such as the avenues mall, which considers the largest mall in Kuwait that contains verities of shops from all around the world. Moreover, it also contains many restaurants that varies from fast food to fancy. Also, it has a very fancy hotel that belongs to the mall, so visitors can enjoy their stay in Kuwait and be very close to the mall and almost everything. We also have a mall that lies next to the port called Marina Mall and people can enjoy eating their food with a beautiful view. I love visiting that mall specially when the weather starts to cool down. There are also a lot of new malls, but since I am in the US, I couldn’t get track of all the new malls. There is a mall that is very close to where I live called 360 mall, it is called 360 because of its circle shape. I always love to go there with my family in the afternoons to have a cup of coffee and chat. We also have an opera house that is called Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Cultural Centre. Kuwait has a very famous park called Al-shaheed Park, which is located in the downtown and people go mostly to exercise, enjoy the fountain’s music performance, visit the park’s museum. It is very pretty I would recommend people to visit it. Furthermore, from time to time the park with host some events like farmers market or music performance. There are many other beautiful places to visit in Kuwait. I have attached some images of the places I have mentioned to give an idea about how they look like.
The links for the pictures I used are below:
http://www.urc.com.kw/Properties/PropertyPages/MARINA.aspx
https://www.glassdoor.com/Photos/MH-Alshaya-Office-Photos-IMG659704.htm
Spotlight
The movie “Spotlight” added new information to my knowledge. I never heard of this movie before. It attracted me when I watched it in class and wanted to know what really happened. The story that the movie covered was very sensitive and the fact that there is a study shows that 6% of the priests can be sexually abusing children made me shocked. These are a lot of priests and this means that there are a lot of victims were affected by that. Yesterday, I read in the news that some priest was charged with sexual abuse and made me think that the things that the movie covered are still going on. Meaning that there is no one putting an end to this. The fact that some priest got assigned to Rome like nothing happened made me think where his conscience went. How can this person that acts on sexually abusing children can sleep at night and get away with what he did? This is very sad and considered as a big problem that many people are affected negatively on it. I wish that this can stop and put an end to it. The fact that the church is been covering the stories and truth is very shocking, disturbing, and considered unethical. I would really want to watch this movie again and tell my friends about it, so we could all watch it together as this movie covers big sensitive case and want my friends to know about it. I like to educate myself with new information as well as the people I love and care about, so they and I would be aware of what’s going on, or what’s been happening.
Unit one
Unit one was very interesting to me because I got to read and learn about literacy narrative. Moreover, got a chance to write a literacy narrative where I had the opportunity to share something real about me. I love when classes give you a chance to apply what you’ve learned from lessons to something you like and love. I also got a chance to know about famous people such as Amy Tam and Malala Yousafzai that I haven’t known before and this learning experience added new information to my knowledge. I also liked how we can get in home groups and discuss the homework or readings together.
This helped me understand different perspectives and learn things or ideas that I may have missed or didn’t understand. Even more, getting in home groups made me get to know my classmates more and be encouraged to speak with them. Specially that I am very shy, that helped me a lot. I also liked the idea of peer evaluation because I had two students who speak or know English better than me to give some useful comments and thoughts to add to my paper and to get a chance to edit it. This was defiantly very useful to anyone not just me. Moreover, I got a chance to read others’ stories in their literature narrative. This made me notice some grammar mistakes or wrong wordings in some sentences and had a chance to correct my mistakes. I am very excited for unit two project and get another chance to work with my home group.
College Life
I have always been excited to come to the US since I was in high school. I thought that if I would live by my own and be independent, it would be fun and easy. However, it wasn’t easy. In fact, it was very hard, and I would feel home sick sometimes. I have learned a lot being in college. For example, you can really know who your real friends are from situations like are they there for you when you needed to go to the hospital in the middle of the night, be there when you’re sad and try to cheer you up or be happy for you for some great achievement you did. Unfortunately, I didn’t get lucky at all with friends when I first got into college. Most of them where filled with jealousy and hypocrisy. They would talk behind your back. Luckily, when I came to Dayton, I have met such a lovely group and they are my close friends now. You can also learn from college life that you have to sometimes keep it together when your semester doesn’t go well and think positive and do your best. College life have taught me how to be responsible and how to take care of myself. College life have taught me to finish my homework and try to sleep early. Because if I didn’t get enough sleep, I won’t be able to concentrate the next day. College life have taught me how to think out of the box. I know 10 years from now, I would miss college, remember all the fun things I did with my friends, and wish that I could go back in time and feel young. However, all I think about right now is my graduation and going back home to my family.
My Writing Process
I enjoy writing my feelings a lot when I feel that no one can understand me. However, this kind of writing does not require a lot of thinking or steps. When I have a writing assignment that requires writing an essay or any kind of academic paper, it would take a lot of my time because I am a very slow writer and it takes a lot of my thinking and brain.
When I want to start to write a paper, I would first make a cup of coffee, so I would feel concentrated. I would stay away from my phone and take the entire day just for this writing assignment as I mentioned before, I am a very slow writer. Meanwhile, I would read what the assignment is asking me to write and what does or doesn’t want me to include in the paper. When I don’t understand some words, I would translate them into my own language. I would do some research if the topic is new to me to have a better idea about what to write. I will also try to connect what I have read from the research to some of my real-life examples. Then I will start to outline my ideas in a piece of paper and brainstorm them. Moreover, I would also try organizing my ideas to diminish some of them. Once I have organized my ideas, I would start to find a good hook that would gain the audience’s attention. Most of the time my hook would be something related to real life examples or some kind of a story.
Once I have the hook, I would follow it with a brief introduction that contains an idea about the content of the paper. I would then write the ideas in the body and finally write a meaningful conclusion. When I am done, I will start revising my paper, see if there is any grammar mistakes or fragments in my sentences and try to fix them. Finally, I will turn in the paper and hope that I did well. This process usually works with me and helps me to get a better grade specially when I outline my ideas and organize them.
About myself
My name is Ritaj Boushehri. I am from Kuwait. I am 22 years old and I’m turning 23 in a week. I am a Senior in Chemical Engineering. I was a student in University of Colorado Boulder for 3 years and a half. I studied English for a year in the international English Center of CU Boulder before going to college. I transferred to UD in Summer 2017. I will be graduating from UD this coming summer. I always wanted to go to Med school, but it didn’t happen, so I chose chemical engineering instead because it has the closest material to medicine.
I have one older sister who graduated from Wright State University in 2017 and two younger brothers. I enjoy cooking Italian food. My mother is an excellent cook and she taught me how to cook. I use cooking to help me get out some stress. I used to have a cat called Flann that I miss so much. I had to give her back to the humane society before coming to Dayton.
While I was a student in the US, I have traveled to Washington DC, Las Vegas, LA, San Diego, Chicago, Niagara Falls, Michigan. I am hoping to go to Hawaii and San Francisco.
In my free time, I like to hang out with my friends or just relax.
I am very excited that I am almost done, so I could go back home and be with my family. I really miss home and my family so much!
English 100 blog 