Namkung/Yong/10/14/2015 Extra Credit (UB Center for Excellence in Writing) Today I sat down with Becky, one of the writing consultant, talking about what she normally do to help people in their writing and her goal. After the conversation, I have learned three important lessons which will benefit me in my future. First, having an obvious statement is important in writing. According to Becky, she meets both undergraduate and graduate students on a daily basis who needs help editing and improving their writing skills. For instance, Becky helps those people how to organize ideas, convey clear thoughts, brainstorming, and fix sentence structures which would look more appealing. Second, proofreading is also very essential to be a good writer. Becky faced problems with students for not proofreading their work properly. For example, she noticed some people who didn’t use proper grammar in their writing, never say new things but repeatedly using too much vocabularies, and did not do thorough work analysis. Becky adds that most people just wanted their writing to be as beautiful as possible. Unlike other students, Becky’s main goal is to make sure people don’t use many big words and make the writing as simple as possible. In other words, she emphasized the importance of “clarity” in writing. I also think maintaining the structure of both clarity and simplicity is important for students who need to improve their writing. Lastly, being confident in yourself is necessary when writing an assignment, not being in a rush. For instance, Becky encourage students to say out loud from what they have wrote, rather than reading from the beginning to end. She tells each people to print out their work and speak for themselves to make sure everything is perfect before writing final draft. She gives strong confidence to students who think