Essay
Description
This is an essay written when I was in an International College called NIC. This essay discusses Papua New Guinea which has the most languages. Basically, it is about the reasons why Papua New Guinea has a huge number of languages and the pros and cons that come from language diversity. That is because I was born and grew up in Japan where most people speak one language only. I was wondering why they need to speak diverse languages and what it is like living with numerous languages. This research paper was very interesting to me.
Reflection
One of the skills I could train in writing an essay is finding academic resources. Since academic essays require credible resources, students should not use general sites such as Google, and Wikipedia. I used to use Google scholar or a library on a college website. The articles' compositions are different from typical sites so it was good training to find and cope with academic resources. The ability to organize thoughts and information would be trained as well because before writing an essay, I made an outline to decide the direction of the essay and put it in order. This step was needed to think it through.
Application
In my eyes, what I did in this assignment would be supportive in the future especially when I am a student at a university. That is because I would write a huge amount of papers and finding good resources and organizing thoughts and information is an essential skills for great essays. Moreover, it also encouraged me to improve my critical thinking and communication skills. As the essay needs to make sense, I tried to make the essay consistent as much as possible which is part of critical thinking. Plus, essays are to show others so I worked on writing clear and understandable essays which is an important skill to communicate with others.
Distinguish a fact from opinion
Description
This is a paper I wrote when I was in HA-class at the International College called NIC. The teacher who gave this assignment was Jordan. In the assignment, I needed to find a fact that seems to be false or hard to believe but true and create a paper to prove the fact realistic. I decided to write about Japan's cultural effects of the pandemic covid-19. At that time, coronavirus was a very hot topic as people would hear the term, Covid-19, at least three times in a day. There was numerous negative news, but I thought the number of victims and inferiors was few compared to other countries. It may be due to the high medical technology. However, I felt there would be other cultural reasons such as peer pressure and general perspective which is the reason why I choose this topic.
Reflection
Through this assignment, I utilized critical thinking skills because I needed to figure out a new fact about coronavirus by myself without bias. At the time I was working on this paper, there was a lot of negative news about the coronavirus, and media broadcasted and rarely compared with other countries about cultural differences amid the pandemic. Because of this, I tried to clarify the cultural effects of countermeasures towards Covid-19 and support my argument that the Japanese culture would restrain the tragedy of COVID-19. Another skill I working on is a further searching skill. As this paper is from my own idea, the number of resources that can support my idea is limited. I remember I read numerous papers' abstracts on a lot of websites.
Application
In the long run, this activity would be beneficial as well because having my own idea and trying to prove the truth is crucial in business. That is how new technologies and products are made. Any innovations come from ideas people came up with in order to satisfy their purposes, such as making people's lives better or earning huge amounts of money, etc. Moreover, searching skills to get credible sources are important too as in the modern world there is a lot of information including fake news. Because of this, believing all information is not a good idea. We should choose information from authentic resources without a biased perspective.