Growing As A Writer

I started writing fiction in elementary school, and never looked back. Tucked away among old report cards and craft projects, my mother still has the multicolored notebook containing my first short story, written when I was in first grade. (It's a treat. I may share it here at some point.) So, when I say that writing in ingrained in me, that it's part of who I am, I mean it.

A semester has passed since I started college and my journey of becoming a better writer. It has been a very important semester for my future college career, and I would not be here without the things I have accomplished. The composition program has really helped me to prepare for what college writing is all about. Now standing here and looking back I could not imagine how it would be without that class. I believe my English, and my writing is better than it has ever been, and all thanks to the composition program.

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.

“ There are your radish seeds everyone.” Said Mr. Susick. The whole class looked around at each other with a blank confused face. It was the first day of junior year in my English class. Mr. Susick started talking about how our first assignment would be to grow radishes. We were all thinking, how in the world does gardening relate to English class. I had heard about this project from previous juniors but none of them said what the real reason was. All Mr. Susick said was that you need to let the project teach itself and get into nature. He left us with one bit of information along with the requirements to start. The main goal of the assignment was to extract your own universal truths. For the first time in English class,

Over the course of this semester I learned a lot about myself as a writer. This English 101 class has really allowed me to expand my essay structure and ways of thinking. This was my first college writing course and it has given me much more freedom when writing because in high school I felt limited and like what we were writing was not very important. In high school I would write essays to just to fulfill the required word or page count and to a degree I still feel like this but maybe that is why I am an engineering major but in this course I actually was able to express my ideas and for the first time really test the limits of my writing capabilities. I really enjoyed being able to incorporate my voice more in my essays and I believe

I did not have a firm writing philosophy before this semester, but I to some degree I understood the importance writing can have on a situation. Now I understand that writing has two outcomes: gaining support or losing support. When writing an essay it is best if the writing is as specific as possible. This way the audience is hopefully not left with a confused opinion about the topic. Since the beginning of the semester I have put a conscious effort to change my writing style. Instead of the box format that is learned in high school I try to use a more graceful approach while still being organized. Also, I evaluate the credibility of a source before I use the information to support my thesis and understand the roles of using ethos,

When I started English 203, I was not a good writer. I have never been the best writer. I could not remember all of the rules, where commas go, and how to correctly use a semi-colon. I did not remember not to use the word you in professional writing or whether the period went before or after quotation marks. But, I think this semester in English I have actually started to pick up the correct way to use quotations, commas, how to avoid contractions, and how to avoid banned words. It took some time but, I feel like I have learned more in the past 16 weeks of English than I have in the past 14 years of school. One of the most valuable writing skills I learned was how to write a review on an article and not

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.

Throughout the school year of 2015-2016 at the Founders Academy, I have wrote numerous essays, with generally positive results. Several of the essays exceeded expectations, while others reached expectations to a modest extent, but all of the essays were supported by the writing skills that I had learned that year, regardless of my strengths or weaknesses with these skills. These techniques vary extensively, from comparing and contrasting ideas in a text to editing and revising essays for quality results, which is proven in my writing portfolio.

As my vocabulary increased so did my writing skills. My word choice in the beginning of the year was very poor and I would use dead words like good, bad, thing, very and other words that had a much better synonym. My vocabulary was not proficient until I was taught over 150 new words and realized that sentences like “I like your soup, it is good” doesn't sound great in the slightest when you can say “I lust for you soup, it surpassed all of my expectation of a full flavor”. My word choice has tremendously changed for the better over this year and it is obvious. Thanks to Mrs Wagner's vocab book that we all hated at first, I have learned how to bring juice into my originally dry essays.

"Sometimes you gotta let something bad happen, or else you wont know how to fix things when they go wrong later."

The contents of this portfolio show the transitions in the revision process as I demonstrate growth. There are four papers I wrote this semester, the original and the revised one that I improved according to the instruction and feedback I received over the course of the semester. From unit one to unit four, there is a significant improve in my writing. With the feedback of each paper, I realized which areas I needed to improve and do better on the next paper. The help from writing lab also made me a better writer, but there still much more I need to improve because I am not a strong writer like my fellow classmates. The portfolio also contains artifacts that I perceive as exemplifying my development as a writer. These are my revision memos of the four papers I wrote and revised, plus a selection from my essay that I believe exemplifies my development as a writer. The last part of the portfolio is the Hupomnemata, which contains my in class writing assignments throughout this semester.

Is it wrong for me to believe that to be a good writer, one must be blessed with natural talents? Or so I thought when I realized that writing is something anybody can do through practice, hard work, and even reading. Of course those who have a natural talent for writing may have it easier, but you don’t need to be a genius to be a writer. To be honest, there was a point in my life where I thought I wasn’t good enough to be called a “writer”, but I was more like a person who just writes. Even in school, I struggle with finding a motivation or passion to be able to write a well thought out paper beyond what the requirements for school are. The fact that I have more weaknesses than strengths left me with the feeling of uncertainty and doubt on whether I can freely write my thoughts and words down onto a piece of paper. I mean if I can’t even do something as simple as that, then how am I ever going to be able to clearly get my point across to those reading. Through my strenuous years of writing countless papers, I still find myself having problems. One of my downfalls has to be the fact that it takes me a longer amount of time to write an essay compared to my fellow peers who can probably finish one within less than an hour.

This year, we have written several essays; all of which I have learned something new to help improve my writing. Looking back at my writing from the start of the year to now, I have encountered substantial improvements in my ability to form an effective introductory paragraph, my ability to use different types of phrases and my development of examples. “My Summer Reading Essay,” written earlier in the year, demonstrates my lack of knowledge on writing an introductory paragraph, using topic sentences and developing examples. However, since the beginning of the year, I have begun to see improvements in essays like “Major Works I” and the “Joe and Claire Narrative” that include more effective introductory paragraphs, the use of different types

Over the course of the year, I received many writing assignments. Some assignments were relatively easy, while others challenged me. I learned a few lessons along the way, and I also enjoyed completing some of the pieces. Looking back on the year, and seeing my assignments graded on the Sage Day Holistic Writing Rubric, it is clear that this year was significant for me in terms of my writing.