I recently had to do a few assignments which involved a good amount of writing in a few of my classes. In both of my Spanish classes I had to write papers about subjects which I had been researching for a good amount of the semester. In one of my computer science courses I had to write a large amount of technical information about a project that involved a lot of design. Through feedback that I have gotten on all of these pieces of writing, I have come to realize that I have a serious issue when I write: I often write with a tone which isn't fitting for the type of writing I'm doing.

In my cs course I basically had to write a technical description of some database software which I had written and justification for my design. I was working with a partner on the project and so after writing a good amount, I handed a draft to my project partner to read. After a few minutes of reading he started to laugh. I was rather confused because it was supposed to be quite a boring piece of technical writing, hardly worthy of laughter. When I asked him about it, he said he was amused by how "profound" my writing is. He noted that when he read it he felt as though it was revealing some huge scientific discovery. After rereading some select parts I realized he was right. I needed to reorganize and "borrify" the writing. On the other hand, maybe I should have left it like it was so that the professor would feel as though he was to be grading an amazing project.

In another course I was writing an essay in Spanish. At one point I had the sentence "La familia [...] trata a Marcos como mierda," which literally translated means "the family treats Marcos like shit." In hindsight, I definitely should have chosen my words better, but that was the best way I knew to explain the idea in Spanish, or at least the first way that came to mind. I guess that any type of academic paper shouldn't use such language. Had I written the paper in English I never would have done that, so I guess it just comes down to the fact that I'm somewhat desensitized to such language in Spanish. Since my second Spanish class I've had class with a student who constantly interjects swearing into his speaking, so maybe it's starting to rub off on me. I surely hope not.