Structure and Written Expression

Structure and Written Expression

Throughout my career, I have always spent more time on studying these grammatical structures which I consider are quite necessary for us to better perform in a written or spoken way. Structure and written expression is the part of the exam with I feel more comfortable. I would add that I enjoy doing this part, especially the one concerning the 25 items in which we have to look for the wrong option; it lets us know if we are actually able to identify common mistakes (that many times we have made).

All the strategies studied during this cohort helped me to ease the process of choosing the appropriate answer for the items. Once I studied and learned the distinctions between some specific words, I was able to identify quickly and easily either the correct option or the mistake in the two parts of this section.  Although I’m still making some bad inferences, I feel I have improved my performance concerning the grammatical structures to be tested during the exam.

In this regard, the experience and insights of the topic covered during this term will be described as follows:

Lesson 32. This section dealt with errors with word forms. I think that this section is one of the easiest to be omitted or noticed for us; most of the time when we see one word in a sentence, we immediately discard that word to be the wrong but actually it is. I dare to say that this happens because we are not familiar the nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs of different words, what makes the process a little bit difficult at the moment of choosing the answer. Fortunately, we were provided with some examples and some charts to complete in which we learned more about these specific words that I personally did not know at all. Something that I noticed was that some words with which we were working on appeared on the partial exam and, of course, they were the wrong option.

Inversions. This topic was such a pain in the neck. I was supposed to have learned how it was used, its rules and its exceptions but what I did not know was that exist other forms that involve inversions as well. For instance, the use of so and the use of prepositions of location. The former was something really strange to me; I was like Does it exist?? Anyway, I had to study hard to get better results and in fact I did get it! 

The day of the quiz came and one of the items played a dirty trick on me, I had forgotten how to use inversions with past modals so I wrote what I considered and as it might be expected, I got that wrong.

Lesson 27 and 35. It had to do with errors and items involving parallel structures or commonly known, parallelism. At first it did not seem to be such a big deal to identify structures in sentences that followed the same pattern, but the problem emerged when we faced new ways involving this structure. There is always something to learn is the phrase that best describes such lessons. It was incredible to realize the way in which the exam measures our abilities to notice these errors concerning basic topics which we have been dealing with since first semester. After all, I was able to identify these patterns in some exercises I practiced on my own and I got a high score in the quiz we took about this.

Lesson 33. This last section was focused on errors in word choice. This was the hardest part for me. It was not until the explanation of the use in context of because and because of that I was able to differentiate them. It was not everything, how will I be able to use live and alive, near and nearly, double and twice? Oh God, for me these words were the same and there was a slightly difference in meaning. All in all, there was something I learned and I was so excited that I was able to differentiate them in many exercises and worksheets I did online; the use of so, such and too I understood fully and some of the items in the exam also involved this types of exercises which I found easy to identify.

Finally, I have to say that when I was taking the simulacrum exam I felt more confident, it was easy for me to understand this section of the exam. Although I got a slower score in comparison with the first simulacrum, I felt that everything I had learned was included there and it did not take me too much time to either identify the mistakes or choose the correct option.  In general, this time I improved my performance in the exam and it is so nice to know it, what I have to do now is to keep on working hard to achieve the course goals.