Throughout school I have always felt comfortable with my academic skills. I always excelled more in English than Mathematics, which definitely helped me across the whole curriculum. I hope this will also continue to benefit me in my academic writing throughout university.

Prior to attempting the online learning units I felt very knowledgeable about my skills and knowledge. I have always been conscious about my punctuation, and whilst I do try to vary my punctuation I tend to steer clear of things I am comfortable with. By reading The Study Skills Book by McMillan, K. and Weyers, J. I feel I have refreshed my memory and the uses of different punctuations have all came flooding back into my brain! I also found the table of “Twenty basic spelling rules” very useful.

Another basic skill I found useful looking over was sentence structure. I briefly remember my English teacher going over this in Fifth Year, but I never actually understood it fully. It is so much more understandable breaking the sentences down into “simple”, “compound” and “complex” sentences and coming to grips what should be in each.

I hope by refreshing my memory my basic skills will be to a standard suitable for university level writing. I also hope it will make me more conscious of my writing style.