During my first semester at college I have had the privileged to be your student. I learned quite a

While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.

I began writing with basic vocabulary and barely any sentence variety. As the year progressed, I learned to advance my vocabulary and word choice in addition to incorporating a diversity of sentence structure. Nearing the end of the school year, I acknowledge that I have grown and learned more about writing. I anticipate that I will receive even more arduous writing assignments that require more research and time. Although it will be challenging, I feel confident that I will do well because I feel well prepared from all I’ve done this year. As I grow older, I will have to continue to write. I know I can take the knowledge I’ve learned this year and apply it to future papers for years to

My writing styles have changed drastically over the past four years of high school. This memo will explain how my writing has changed and how my knowledge of writing has improved.

Revising a paper literally means to “renew again”, to look for something fresh in critical perspective. Revision is an ongoing process of rethinking the paper: reconsidering the arguments, reviewing the evidence, refining the purpose, reorganizing the presentation, reviving the paper’s perspective. At first, I thought revision was just fixing commas, grammar and spelling, but no, fixing minor errors like grammar, spelling and punctuation are called, proofreading. Proofreading is an important step before turning in a paper, but if the ideas are predictable, the thesis is weak, and the organization of the paper is a mess, then proofreading will just act like a band aid to cover the little scars on the paper. Writing is a process of discovery, and writers don’t always produce the best stuff from the first draft they made. So revision is a chance to look at the paper once again and to analyze critically what a writer has written.

This year I have learned a lot from College Writing, this class has taught me a lot about my own writing and what makes a good essay. I have learned a lot about myself as a writer and as a person throughout the course. In this reflection of the past semester I will be going through my past papers and talk about what I liked and how I could’ve made them better. I will also be going through the activities that have shaped my writing the most. Hopefully, I will be representing how I have grown as a writer throughout the year because of this class. Before taking this class I was already relatively confident in my writing abilities and was excited to take the class. Now that the course is completed I am even more confident in my writing because of all the new techniques and helpful tips I learned.

Have you ever given much thought about revising your paper? We correct the spelling, fix the grammatical errors, and give it one last read through then we hand it in. Revision is one of the most important pieces when writing an essay, but do we overlook it? I most certainly did until I read Barbra Tomlinson’s essay, “Tuning, Tying, and Training Texts: Metaphors for Revision”. Tomlinson opened my eyes and I see a whole new light when it comes to revising my papers.

I am tearing my hair to squeeze every single word from my poor mind to finish this letter. Yet deep in my frontal cortex, there is no part of mechanisms that is designed for writing a self-analyzing letter to my instructors. However, it has been ten weeks I studied in this course, and all my favorite works in these ten weeks are gathering in this tiny portfolio. I have wrote a several rhetorical practices that taught me basic rules of rhetorical essays. I have wrote a rhetorical analysis, which explained both the thesis of the reading and my own arguments against the reading. I finished my last rhetorical project three days ago with telling another interesting story. All these assignments were tiny pieces of my writing style and they built up together to present me a general concept of being a successful writer. I learned that, and I made a number of changes to upgrade my writing skills. At last, I decide to offer you these changes I have made as a start-up story writer in the college.

The Memo will directly address my growth as a writer throughout my time in EH 101-13. It will also highlight my current strengths and weaknesses in my own personal writing style.

Over the course of this semester, my confidence in writing has improved greatly. In high school, I didn’t really know how to write effectively. I wasn’t really sure what was considered to be “good writing” until I took AP* English. However, even while I was taking this “Advanced Placement” class, I was still trying to figure out how to really create “good writing”. I feel as if this had something to do with the fact that I never really had to work with the rules of grammar intensively. After taking this course, however, I now have a much better understanding of how to correctly use proper grammar. I also improved on using transitional phrases in my writing. I have implemented my understanding of proper grammar and transitional phrases in both my writing inside and outside of this class as a result.

Thinking back to the beginning of the semester, I improved in fixing my mistakes in my writing. Whenever I review and edit my drafts, I would usually overlook most mistakes because I would just read my draft but not look at the mistakes I commit. In my paper one draft, “Opening, social mind bugs are a trait human have developed to become social: human is social animals.” In my paper, one final, “Opening, social mind bugs are traits humans have developed to become social: humans are social animals.” In this first paper, I only recognized little mistakes that stood out in my final paper. I already noticed that I can remove the word “opening,” and I could have used a semicolon instead of a colon. I improved on looking for grammar mistakes. I started using a trick my tutor recommended for me to use when I am editing my paper. I should read my draft slower, so I

The first essay that I revised was Essay 2, Analyzing an Unsustainable Practice which dealt with cell phone addiction. The main reason why I chose to revise this essay is because I feel like it is a topic that could be expanded on and many people could relate to it. Moreover, when I received the feedback on this essay, I noticed a few major and minor adjustments I could make to build on my essay. So, the major improvements I made in this essay were rearranging my paragraphs to make the essay flow smoothly, adding another paragraph explaining the development of poor communication skills, and providing examples to expand on my points that were unclear. I also made minor improvements to this essay which was making a small tweak to my thesis to make the audience understand the point I am trying to make and fixing my incorrect grammar.

Prior to taking this class, I would always just complete the number of drafts that my teachers would request. I would simply make the small grammatical edit and not worry too much about the argument or how my prose sounded. Tons of useless filler sentences and unnecessary words filled my papers. That said, no one is ever going to make a perfect paper because writing is not about being perfect. It is an ongoing quest for persistent development of your work and this was crucial for me to realize. I would always assume that my work did not need numerous edits or copious amounts of revision. Looking back, I am not sure if this was because I secretly feared having to correct myself so I deliberately ignored digging through all of the flaws, or that I believed my writing quality would be just sufficient to reach my desired grade. I think the more realistic answer is the former. This semester has encouraged me to break down the stigma around needing to write a perfect paper. It is not happening. Once I came to this conclusion, my reservations about truly analyzing my papers melted away slowly. This testament to the continual process that is writing, though initially tough to deal with, will surely make my writing better and more

For the revision project, I needed to make more changes to this paper due to not fully getting my point across or because I needed to add some more information to my paper. The first thing that I had to work out was my title. I read the beginning of my paper again and decided on a better suited title that would fit into what my paper was mostly about. Next, I had to fix a sentence that contradicted what I had said earlier in my paper. Another big issue in my paper was the placement of the story of Dylan Roof. To fix this mistake I used parts of my essay that talked about Dylan Roof to form a back story closer to the beginning of my paper. Some of the other sentences that I had written originally made more sense in my mind and when I put them on paper they made it sound like I was saying something different, so I changed the wording in those sentences.

I feel as though my reflective essay about earning my GED was the paper with the most effective revision. The first couple of drafts were great. My original thesis was strong and my paragraphs were detailed and concise. However, my paper greatly improved when I started to make revisions. In the first drafts I never specified the reasoning behind my topic. I simply thought that the reader would not be interested in why I didn’t graduate high school. My introduction stated that I didn’t and my paper was reflective upon the experience of earning my GED. From the readers standpoint, there was a disconnect. My peers and even my instructor suggested that I elaborate on the reasoning behind the topic. Once I made this recision, the paper became more

Over the course of this past semester, my ability to write has improved tremendously. Prior to undertaking this course, my expertise in writing was not as fine-tuned as it should have been. I had never previously been enrolled in a class specifically tailored to writing-- which was quite clear. Upon reading my past works, it becomes apparent that my writing style consisted of fluff, small words, and inconsistently structured sentences. These problems have, for the most part, been remedied with the coursework I have tackled in College Writing. Rather than long, drawn out papers that take an eternity to reach the primary point, my recent work is much nicer in terms of composition and grammar. I credit these improvements to the three primary