Essay on A Reflection Upon My Writing

Writing has affected my life for the better, but our relationship is still rocky. I never realized how much of an impact writing would have on my life, until I began my career in law enforcement. Prior to my career in law enforcement, I was a student-athlete. I always viewed writing as a chore, something that I had to do, and that always frustrated me. It frustrated me, because, I did not think I was good at it. I then discovered personal writing. I began writing letters, telling stories, the whole nine yards; I learned to allow personal writing to be an outlet, and that helped me to become an overall better writer. After I became familiar with personal writing, writing started to grow on me. I found myself doing more and more writing, and I was enjoying it. When I enjoy writing, it makes the whole process seem easier.

Everyone on the planet has a goal set in life, but only a handful attempt to improve to obtain their goal by studying the subject their goal is in. In my English class, English 101 this quarter I was astonished by how much I had progressed as a writer sharpening my writing skills and also learned a lot about writing that I hadn’t learned before. In my writing portfolio for this quarter I had to write an autobiography essay, a research essay, and this reflection essay to develop my writing skills better. The writing assignments were fun to do because it challenged me to work on essays of different styles that were new to me. The essay assignments helped me grow as a better writer that gave me the self-confidence and skills to take on the world on my own.

As the semester comes to a close, it is always interesting to look back and reflect on the events and opportunities my English class has given me throughout my first semester as a whole. At the beginning of this semester it was evident that I was feeling uncomfortable due to the adjustment that I was going through as a student moving to college. It was very difficult expressing myself through my writing since I was nervous about good impressions and my good grade. While this class was one of the most difficult courses that I have taken this far, it has become quite evident to me that I have grown a substantial amount as a writer and as a person; Especially, when it came to explaining my ideas, writing academic essays, and making arguments.

Writing is something we have been used to since childhood. Beginning to write with just a few words and activities to improve our pendmanship. From easy sentences we all gradually improve our writing, as expected from higher levels of education. However, throughout all this time, many of us have been writing blind. Only writing what is seen an necessary, oblivious to the true skill and precision it takes to actually write quality work. Through the use of Anne Lammott’s article “Shitty First Drafts” and personal experiences, I will advice you, my fellow freshman, on certain a aspect of writing that you may not have known prior to joining the college world, as well as offer some life advice.

When I stop to think about the memory’s that I have made during my first semester of college; there are both good and bad pieces or times that present themselves. Often with many things there are gray areas, and writing would fall in there for me. I fortunately understand now that I have times where I can over look many of my writing flaws. Such as sentence structure! This by far was my biggest problem in this class, and I fully understand why. Personally I have times that will type up a paragraph and never notice the mistake. That is until someone points it out to me. It’s almost like my brain knows that something is wrong with it, but for some unknown reason it won’t register when I’m revising my paper. So as a writer I have realized that I need to take advantage of people around me and get their feedback on my essay’s; because

It wasn’t until this class, where I was told that I was not being asked to explain in great detail what has shaped me into this amazing writer that I am today, but instead to explain what type of writing I feel comfortable with. At that point I realized that this assignment may not be quite as difficult as I thought.

Coming into this class, I wasn't sure what to expect. Of course,I expected to be writing a lot but was unsure of the type of writing and the style. I was looking forward to writing challenging pieces that stretching me creatively as a writer. I wanted to explore how to express myself in my writing because it had been a long time since I'd written a creative essay. One of my main hopes for this class was challenging myself to become a better editor of my own papers. I often find it a tedious and laborious process to find and edit the grammatical errors in my papers. However, this is an important skill that I need to develop for my future as a successful writer.

We were told to write about a memory or experience we had with writing or reading. I found this difficult right off the gate due to my lack of enthusiasm of the class. Once I sat at home and ranted for a while, until the book and experience was chosen for me to start compiling for the day to day tasked that were demanded of me. As I was compiling I was seeing my thoughts of the rants slip into the paper that I was to turn in. After writing the paper I reread the work; astonished as I was I just laughed at the idea and believed this was just going to be unacceptable. Next day to my surprise it was accepted. As I read it aloud my peers and the teacher tore it apart in the class and gave feedback that they felt would help improve it. Shuffling through all the bits of ideas at night shaking and shifting the words around piecing the puzzle to create my paper. Clinching on the questions that arose with Faizon asking about repetitive sentences in the paper, along with Tori’s request for more description. Then having the teacher point out the words I chose to depict the descriptions at times were vague. Keeping those suggestions in mind and more I went through again and again to find the hidden errors with the heightened sight that was giving to me with others views among the forest of characters before me. Hunting out each mistake able

Writing an essay in college is a big challenge for most students, including myself. It involves strong critical thinking and a meticulous process. After narrowing down and selecting a topic, we then need to establish the main point and how we want to deliver our opinions, ideas, or visions to our audience. We want to create a piece of writing that delivers a clear message, with strong and relevant details, to support the main point. We need to think and plan thoroughly, write, review, and rewrite before we get the end result. This is why drafting, reviewing, revising, and editing are vital parts of writing.

All the stories and essays I had written for my creative writing and English classes in college were kept in a wicker basket in my small apartment room. One morning, I went through everything to try and part with some material. I picked up my portfolio from a writing class I had my junior year and began reading the story I submitted as my final piece. I knew that reading it now meant I would be cringing at the young, flawed writer I was. Except I wasn’t focused on the writer as I read through, but the person.

Throughout my writing career I never would have considered myself a solid writer as it wasn’t until this semester that I actually received my first A on a paper in my high school or college writing career. This came soon into this semester as I realized that something needed to change for me to give myself a chance at making an A in writing for this semester. These changes I knew needed to come from my writing process as I felt that my process was witholding me from achieving A’s on my writing assignments. After reflecting on my writing process, I concluded that I needed to change the processes by which I wrote and edited my papers. This semester my writing has benefitted from the changes to my writing process in the aspects of writing and editing rough drafts as the quality of my writing has improved since the implementation of breaks in my writing and multi person editing of my rough drafts in my

It was a miracle that i got through that those essays and the class. My sophomore year came around and so did english 2, i was prepared to dread that class more than anything else. I remember feeling uneasy when getting an introduction to the first written assignment. It was noticeable that the teacher was motivated to get familiar with a new type of outline the english department had came up with since it seemed like the one before was of no support to us students. The outline seemed bearable at first glanced but at the back of my head, the question of “how do i put my thoughts into words” still remained a mystery. I was aware that for my writing to improve, my way of organizing my thoughts in words had to improve too. The teacher used the outline and showed us how to write a proper essay including how to phrase our thoughts in the direction of our writing. In that class i had an awakening and was enlighten to what was the begining to my first real writing. I remembered writing that first assignment with interest and comprehension. My thoughts formulated its way into my writing. My writing constructed into a well written essay about the universal idea of the book ‘Of Mice and

From this process I learned the importance of not adding extra information, reading my story aloud to proofread, and developing my sentences. In my first draft I wrote a lot of unnecessary information which lead my essay to have a number of words that exceeded the word count. This time I made sure to only include information that was necessary. For the first essay, when I was proofreading my work in my head. As a result, I had many typos and missed many errors. On the final project, I read my essay out loud and my proofreading was more efficient. Finally, on my first essay one of my comments was that some of my sentences were choppy, so I made sure that all of my sentences flowed nicely. For my new piece I am especially proud of my

My writing skills are decent, if I take the time to fully process my thoughts. When it is a timed assignment or test, my skills go right out the window, I concentrate more on answering the prompt rather than the grammar, punctuation, or structure. It’s like a jumbled mess of writing filled with lots of errors. When I’m writing my main goals are to answer the prompt, have good structure, and no grammatical or punctuation errors. These goals sometimes get in the way of me expressing myself freely; if a sentence doesn’t flow right with rest of the paragraph, I will re-examine my paragraph or paper to see if I can conjure up a sentence to finish out my paragraph before moving on to the next paragraph. Another example is if I feel like I don’t

The beginning of was not exactly pretty. My writing was choppy, I was clueless on how to properly research something, nor did I understand how to appropriately convey my thoughts in the proper manner. I still remember the first draft I turned in. There was more red ink on those pieces of paper than some students see a full semester. I became slightly discouraged until a brief, yet life-changing conversation took place.