After completing the pre-course test, I realized that in the past few years away from an academic environment my writing skills have become a bit rusty. Although, I have been writing for personal and professional purposes, I have not utilized many of the important writing skills. Some areas I feel I need to work on are dangling and misplaced modifiers and wordiness. 

     Modifiers can be challenging at times because there are so many different ways of conveying the same meaning. While doing the pre-course test I found that there were instances where I was not placing the modifier close enough to the word. When I recited the sentence aloud I could better hear the errors. I plan to improve upon this by taking the time to read my work out loud and ensuring that the modifiers are as close that they can be to the word and also that it clearly applies to that word or group of words.


    One of the other writing skills I need to work on is wordiness. Similar to the modifiers, wordiness can easily occur when there are many ways to communicate the same phrases. In academic writing, is it important to know how to convey information in both concise manners and also to know when further elaboration is necessary.  I will work on this skill by also reciting the phrase aloud and paying close attention to the flow of the sentence and looking for repetition and unnecessary words of phrases. 

    This sample test has given me a good insight on the skills I need to work on and will allow me to focus on my weaker skills in order to produce stronger academic pieces.