Five Skills ; 427 Words

The five skills that I would like to improve on while in this class would be : how to properly format a paper in MLA/APA format, understanding plagiarism, knowing what to do when you get stuck writing a paper, properly using in-text citations, and knowing how to find credible sources through Google. College consist of writing paper after paper. With that being said, I believe that if I could improve on the five skills listed above that It would be beneficial for me, and not just in this course, but in my future courses as well. I would say that of the five skills I'd like to improve on, I'd like to improve the most on "knowing what to do when you get stuck writing a paper." I get distracted very easily and then I find myself stuck in mid-paper and really don't know what to do. Throughout high school, my teacher would tell me just to get up and walk around and think about something other than the paper, but i'm also not a very patient person, so once I start something I wanna get it over with as quick as possible. If I could just find a way to continue writing after I get stuck, that would be very helpful. The other four skills that I would to improve on could all be classified under the same category I guess you could say. All of the papers i'm gonna write in the future are gonna have to be in MLA format, because of my major. These papers are not only gonna have to be typed correctly in MLA format, but also be credible, therefore I need good sources. Google provides good sources, you just have to know how to go about searching and that's where I struggle. Most of the websites that pop-up when I search for sources are ".com" and ".org." Being able to find credible sources like ".edu" would be very helpful. Finding these sources though really means nothing if you don't know how to cite them in your paper correctly. I understand WHY you should cite, but sometimes I struggle at knowing WHEN you should cite. Plagiarism is a very big deal when it comes to writing papers, so I feel like I need to get better at in-text citation and just citation in general. I guess I would say that I need a little review of what the meaning of "plagiarism" is and all of the ways that you can prevent it. Improving these five skills would make a huge difference.