Skimming the Surface

During high school, all of my teachers always reminded us how important it was for us to not plagiarize when writing papers. They taught us the correct MLA format for writing bibliographies and inserting parenthetical citations into our work. Therefore, I feel that I have done and have been doing really well at not plagiarizing or relying too heavily on the original text. I have always tried my best to completely read all of the original text whether they be books, articles, etc., and tried to relate ideas in such a way that I would be able to talk about them. I must say though that after being at Santa Clara, and more specifically after being in my C&I class for the past two quarters, I have definitely improved in comprehending the information I was reading about and being able to relate that information to particular themes especially since the types of books that we were reading in that class were a bit difficult to understand in the first place. Also, because my professor required that we include many short and meaningful quotes instead of long, summary block quotes, I have improved on noticing which parts of the original text hold more meaning and are more relevant than others. I definitely think there's still a long way to go for me to become an exceptional writer, but I feel that I'm well on my way there. I've been forced to really think critically, much more so than I was ever required to, and that has improved my writing tenfold. I work harder to comprehend the material I'm writing about and to connect them to specific themes and ideas.