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READING RECORD

(English-APP 1st Session)

UNIT 1: THE NATURE OF ACADEMIC TEXTS

To begin with, in this unit I have learned the Academic and Non-academic texts where academic texts are written by professionals in a given field for the academic audience, they are formal and states critical questions and issues. While non-academic texts are written for the mass public and can be written by anyone with the use of informal language. In addition, I was able to familiarize the word discipline we're it was designed and developed to help us understand the phenomena in our world. Lastly, I learned the branches of academic disciplines which are the business, humanities, social sciences, and natural and applied sciences where they have their own vocabularies, styles, and modes of communication, and when in case if I can't discern the issues and problem I'll just find the existing binary oppositions to help me comprehend the issue of the text better.

UNIT 2: THESIS STATEMENT AND OUTLINING

In this unit, I was able to learn how to write a strong thesis statement and its characteristics, moreover, I was also able to identify the main ideas of an outline and how to make an outline on a certain topic. So firstly in lesson1, I learned that thesis statement is the main idea that written in the introductory paragraph of a paper. Thesis statement shows your stand on a certain issue, it asks a question, makes a claim that can be debated, and it represents the argument of your paper to the readers. So when writing a strong thesis statement I always remember to ask myself, is my thesis statement answers a question? can it be disputed by others? Does my thesis statement specific enough? Does it pass the so what test? The how and why test? This instances is just one of the few tips on how to write a strong thesis statement and it must be backed with facts and a long research process. Secondly in lesson2, I learned about outlining academic texts, where it helps writers categorized the main points. A well-written outline must have a thesis statement, the main ideas for each paragraph, and the evidence or supporting details. So there are two ways to outline ideas for outlining texts and that would be the topic outline, which only utilizes keywords and concepts, and sentence outline which utilizes complete sentences to organized the ideas. And lastly, I was able to learn about IMRAD outlining, where IMRAD stands for Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion.

UNIT 3: WHAT IS SUMMARY AND TECHNIQUES IN SUMMARIZING A TEXT

To begin with, in this unit I was able to understand what a summary is and the techniques in summarizing academic texts. In lesson 1 I recalled the definition of summary, where it is a shorter and more condensed version of a given text. It gives the reader the idea of what is the text about, for short, the goal of a summary is to reproduce the key ideas and express them with precise language. Whenever I make a summary of a certain paper I use techniques for me to prepare, which are previewing, skimming, and scanning. They're truly is effective at the same time helping to do before writing a summary. In lesson 2, I was able to learn that when summarizing a text, it must have the author's thesis statement in the first sentence, then break down the research into main ideas before summarizing the whole and, omit ideas that are not relevant to the whole text. In accumulation to this, the language to chose must not only be precise but also convey the imperative concept. Lastly, I was also able to follow the steps in summarizing a text.

UNIT 4: WHAT IS PARAPHRASING AND TECHNIQUES IN PARAPHRASING, PARAPHRASING VS. QUOTING

To begin with, in this unit I have learned the definition of paraphrasing, where it is the restatement of a text, passage, or work giving the meaning in another form. So there are 4 kinds of paraphrasing which are the change of part of speech, change of structure, clause reduction, and synonym replacement. Since I was already familiar the word plagiarism, in this lesson I just recalled its definition where plagiarism is the claiming of ownership of material that is not your own. Then I learned the different kinds of plagiarism, it is the word for word plagiarism or verbatim plagiarism, word order plagiarism and idea plagiarism. In addition I was able to learned about the techniques in paraphrasing, which the one I use often everytime I paraphrase is the change of words, where it replace the words with a new part of speech, then we have also the paraphrasing word order change where it was the changes from the active voice to the passive voice or vise versa. Furthermore, I also learned about quoting which is repeating what the author said word by word but with proper citations. So there is a technique that needs to be follow in writing a quote which is the ice method, where ICE stands for introduce, cite, and explain. When quoting, I always remember to not forget any elements of quoting because it will result to plagiarism. Lastly, I was able to learned the difference between quoting and paraphrasing where quoting is used with shorter phrases or sentences, while paraphrasing is effective for longer sentences.

UNIT 5: CITING SOURCES OF INFORMATION

In this unit, I have learned about 3 major citation styles used in academic writing and how to choose which citation style to use. First of all, I learned that a citation is a way to give credit to the author whose creative and intellectual work you used to support or supplement your own research. It is also used to easily locate the sources used as well as help avoid plagiarism. In addition, I also get familiarize about citation style where it dictates what information is necessary to include in a citation, how that citation should be organized, what punctuations are use and other formatting concerns. I was able also to know the forms of citation which are in-text citation, parenthetical citation and reference citation. Where the difference between in-text and parenthetical citation is that in-text citation, the author's name is incorporated into the text as part of the sentence and the year follows in parentheses. While parenthetical citation is that the author's name and publication date appear in parentheses. And in reference citation, it refers to the complete bibliographic entries of all references used by the writer. Then lastly I learned the kinds of citation styles where we have the APA citation that is used in education, psychology, and social sciences, then the MLA citation where is normally used in humanities, and the Chicago/Turabian style which is often used in business, history and fine arts. Honestly, I easily get confused in these topics but im still working hard to understand the lessons better.