Entering English Composition Analysis

Upon entering Columbia College, writing was one of my weaker areas. It was very important that I gained the necessary knowledge and confidence to become a better writer. I didn’t know how to express myself and felt as though my writing was not my interest. As a result of taking English 101, I have gained a better understanding on how to properly research and build a satisfactory paper. Every paper that was assigned seemed like a struggle to complete. Before entering this class, I did not know the meaning of a thesis or why it was important, however, I obtained this skill quickly. I noticed that every paper has an argument and the thesis helps clarify the rebuttal. Now, I have a new outlook on writing. It’s a way to express my thoughts and allow others to see things through my eyes. There is no doubt that I still have a long way to go, but I know if I continue to write, I will get better. Just as I developed more skills in class, the various papers assigned helped to better structure the writer in me. In addition, the subject areas were not only interesting, but very informative and made it much easier to write about my experiences.

irst-year composition should be a requirement for all first time college students at Sacramento State. A class such as a first-year composition course will be vital in guiding you throughout college no matter your major choice or career path. The course introduces you to what the process of writing at a college level means and it enhances the necessary skills that are already present in first year college students.

With the anxiety flowing throughout my body, I knew the time was near of facing my English 1301 class. Being told that I needed to improve my writing during my grade school days, I knew that I didn’t feel at ease going into a college level English class. But, with this in mind I had to pull myself together to encounter the challenges that I will face. However, having the privilege of having an amazing professor I believe my writing skills improved, also I was able to find my confidence.

One of my biggest challenges was accepting the fact that I had numerous habits that I developed in high school which were restricting my creativity. After reading Revising Attitudes by Brock Dethier, I now know that your first draft isn’t meant to be perfect. While writing drafts you need to let it go and not try to perfect anything. A rough draft is called rough for a reason. As a perfectionist, it was hard for me to comprehend the fact that I need to let go. I quickly found out that this would end up being one of my biggest weaknesses. I became frustrated with myself since I couldn’t figure out ways to revise my essay that had obvious problems. I was able to learn from my mistakes from the last assignment and avoid them. I now know to start narrowing your topic down when brainstorming your topic. Then you would continue to be more specific as you do your initial research. This helped me be crystal clear with what I wanted to write about and in the end helped me figure out which claims

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

To start off, I would like to say that I am interesting in taking AP English Literature and Composition for a variety of reasons. I believe it would be a great class to get me ready for collage, which would be the main reason. I love to read and I want to become better at analyzing my reading and learn strategies to get better at that skill. I want to continue to grow in the areas of analyzing literature and to transcend in that area of expertise. Also, not to mention, it would look good on collage applications. Lastly, I know that there is a lot of reading in the class and I want to explore more novels and read more of the olden classics.

My initial reaction to my essay was rather...meh. The writing was still very characteristic of Dave Gao. There were no gasps of horror induced by my former writing quality. But as I peered deeper into the language of the paper, I began to notice subtle, yet significant changes I had undergone throughout the year. I have to admit that at the time, I believed my essay was excellent—a verifiable work of beauty. Now, the essay looked crude, and a bit too simplistic. The vocabulary seemed rather

Have you ever wondered whether a writer’s voice and the standard rules of academic writing can exist on the same page? According to Dr. Debra Pena, English Professor, University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) and Mathew Teorey, English Professor, University of New Mexico and the author of "Using Freshman Composition to Analyze What Students Really Know about Grammar" a writer’s voice and the process of academic writing can exist on the same page (Personal Communications February 13, 2017, Teorey 2). However, my first essay In Freshman Composition II titled, “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE): Is it the New Death Sentence for Future Athletes Playing Sports in America?” where I lost the power of my voice to the process of academic writing.

One of the most important course objectives that I’ve grown accustomed to is the writing process itself. In the writing process, we are able to revise our writing where it is weak and earn a better grade than before. Since I took advantage of the revision process, not only was I able to improve my grade, but I was able to prevent the same mistakes from happening again in other writing assignments. From revisions alone, I’ve learned how to improve my writing skills and catch mistakes that I wouldn’t have seen

I think self-reflection, or a careful cogitation of one’s personal work, is very important. It will help me think about my strengths and weaknesses in my writing skills and learning process, so that I can improve my weaknesses in the future and become a better writer. I believe, I have many strengths and many weaknesses that can be seen transparently through my drafts, revisions, and final essays, or writings, this semester. My overall strength includes the ability to pick out good examples from articles and the ability to construct good development of my body paragraphs after my revisions. On the other hand, my overall weakness includes having some unclear explanation of thoughts, unclear topic sentences, confusing thesis statements, having undefined terms, difficulties transitioning from one idea to another. I have learned that to have a good essay, I must revise my papers more than once because there are always flaws that can be fixed or improved. My writing process has evolved from having difficulties writing down or explaining my thought process to being able to explain and clarify examples to help support my thesis statement.

English is a hard language to learn, for there are numerous elements of effective usage and writing. Many people, including me, struggle in writing because of a lack of knowledge. Since middle school, English was not a strong suit of mine. I struggled with the simplest of tasks often taking a considerably longer time to complete a task than the other students. Unmotivated teachers and a lack of interest resulted in remedial writing skills. To put it simply, I had little confidence in my writing and I dreaded taking the class because of the writing involved. In spite of my fears, I took the course and I was able to perfect and challenge my mediocre writing skills.

The key struggles had in English course is to put my thoughts and well developed ideas on paper. Every time we would have new assignments it would take me a while to have clear ideas and brainstorm them. How I worked to overcome come them is I would always ask Mrs. Fox for help and I would also do a lot of research about that particular topic. The most helpful thing that helped me to overcome that struggle was the rubrics and checklist that we would get in class. Because that would help me stay focused on what I really need to write about. The other struggle I had was with my grammar and sentence fragments. what I did to help me make my paper look well polished is I would go to the writing center and have tutor look at it and fix what needs

Exploring First Year Composition, now on abbreviated as FYC, as it benefits students outside of the English core curriculum. In what ways does FYC benefit students outside of their English classes? In this first article titled Composition as a Write of Passage by Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, the usefulness of FYC is explored in many different forms. Singh-Corcoran breaks down FYC into many different components ranging from knowledge transfer (which is “the degree to which we can use newly learned skills and abilities and apply them in other contexts”) (Singh-Corcoran 3), to the reason and goals of taking FYC, to even the assessment criteria of a standard paper that would be due in such a class. She goes in depth into the goals of the FYC courses

This weeks' review is all about revisions, both large scale and small scale revisions to help us complete our final essay, the home stretch in this course. I have revised my essay at least ten times over the past few weeks. Being a professional for the past 20+ years summarizing what is said in something more than a bullet point or short email has proven to be difficult. What was I trying to communicate in my earlier versions is very close to where I am today but the route I am taking to get to this conclusions is much different thank I had anticipated . My ideas were all over the map and didn’t make any sense, in the beginning, the reverse outline helped tremendously. I have a decent thesis statement. I’m finding it difficult to have solid topic sentences, and bringing everything together has also been a challenge.

“Welcome Class to Composition one.” Those words were voiced by my professor, Mrs. Robinson, on the first day of school. Initially, I thought to myself, do I even belong in this college course class. Before school had even begun, the stress over the summer about my English skills was eating me alive. Why? Well, in my past English classes I received A’s on all of my essays, but this college class did not seem so easy. Also, I was always fascinated by all the arts and sciences, but English never struck interest in me. I never thought that I could write any decent essays. The reason I insecure about my writing skills was because of the ACT. Since the ACT is the talk about how smart an individual is, my ACT score was not very high. As the course continued, the first essay approached quickly. I remember being stressed about this essay because of my writing insecurities. Although I managed to acquire a decent grade, I promised myself to strive to make myself a better writer. I started to read Norton Field Guide to Writing handbook also known as the yellow book, and slowly but surely started to develop knowledge of good writing skills and tips to improve my essays. This allowed me to grow as a writer and slowly my insecurities started to dwindle, and I began to gain confidence in myself. I never would've thought that the next time I took the ACT that my English score would be my highest. When getting my score back and realizing that I had improved so much, I began to wonder how I