My First Class Of The Year

August 28, 2017, the first day of my fresh and scary journey. My first day as a Colorado Christian University student, English composition online is my first class. Part of me is ready; part of me is ready to throw in the towel. I hadn’t even had a chance to turn a paper in, and the first assignment, a 5-paragraph essay had me thinking “you’re a crazy person for going back to school, it’s been 11 years since you had to write a paper. What are you thinking?” I told myself its 5 weeks (later I would realize actually 6) you can make it 5 weeks! Although I knew writing wouldn’t be my easiest subject, I knew I had to try my hardest. This class was condensed and hard, but effective and informative; I’ve learned so much, felt all sorts of emotions and know I can apply what I’ve learned in classes to come.

Throughout the course of this semester in AP Lang, my eyes have been opened to many of the weaknesses I never knew I had in writing. Coming into this semester, I had heard about the difficulty of this class, but was not unduly worried about not receiving an A; I have always considered myself as a competent if not strong writer. However, after failing to attain desired grades on several important essays, I was devastated, and realized that although I had mastered the basics of grammar and writing, there was still much for me to work on. Also, I did not understand that much of my grade in AP Lang would be determined by speaking in front of others, which is not my strong suit. What I have come to find is that writing essays containing all of the new information we have learned throughout the semester, such as requirements for different types of essays and good writing strategies, takes a lot of work, time, and thinking. Unfortunately, my procrastination caused me to only get done what had to be done instead of putting in the extra work and truly understanding everything.

Completing freshman composition is one of the greatest accomplishments I have achieved throughout my high school career. I have experienced an immense amount of improvement on my writing as well as a huge deal of stress throughout the semester. In the past, writing was never one of my strong suits; however, I have learned quite a bit, for example, how to use semicolons, write with metacognition, and how to correctly do a works cited. During my time in this class, I have: reflected, set goals, learned the writing process, tracked my progress, and learned a huge deal about myself, life and college.

I need to just start writing even if it is awful, or even if it is hard to get myself to start writing because just the action of doing it and starting to write will help me to be able to write good papers. It will help me to be able to write and to do it because I know I should, and I know I can. I’m glad I read that because it’s good for me to know that other people struggle with basically the same stuff that I struggle with, having a bad first draft, and not wanting to start writing, but to put it off for awhile. Having knowledge now that it’s normal to not have desires to put stuff off, and just write crazy things in your draft, since it isn’t final. But it’s possible if you just commit yourself to it. Then it will most likely work out for the

Entering the class, english comp. one, I had many fears as to what the class would be like. I had no idea what to expect as a senior in highschool. During the past english classes I had, we wrote papers, just not a different one every day. Going into english comp. one, I figured it would be the same method in english just like the past classes I had. On the very first day in the class, I quickly found out that I would have to buckle down a little more than I have been in the past. I knew then, from what Mrs. Garth had told us, that I was going to have many weaknesses while writing my papers, but I would also have many strengths from what I had learned in the past about writing.

Back in high school my teacher for advanced placement language class would automatically give the top student high grades, but for students like me we were not looked at with any improvement. This put a permanent “You are not a good writer” in my mindset before every time I would sit down to write a paper. Even to this day I still lack confidence in writing, so I am going to have a positive attitude and challenge my weaknesses throughout this semester. The four learning goals stated will help evolve my writing skills and are extremely important to achieve success in this english course. My personal goals for this semester is to receive an A on each paper, build confidence to share my writing to others, and to have good time management skills for submitting papers. I know we will be taught different forms of writing throughout the semester and techniques to go along with it, but from prior experience I think I am at some sort of advantage with writing. I currently have a marketing major, so I do believe that persuasive writing and tools such as rhetoric will help me be a successful sales representative in the

I have to write a paper for every class, so things that I learn from taking my ENGL 160, like identifying genre and writing an argumentative paper, it helps me determine my audience that would be reading my material and would want to learn more about it. Even though, my learning and writing has progressed from taking English, my procrastination is still relevant in my coursework. I would leave some of my papers until the last minute, which I know is not the best way to write it a college paper, but most of the time I do not know what to write about or do not feel inspired to write, until the assignment is almost due. This procrastination is not healthy for my academic career, so I need to practice taking responsible for my work and become a better student and a

Before this semester, I didn’t know what was expected of me in a college writing class. I thought there would be tough requirements and the professor would assign around five to ten pages for every assignment. However, this semester isn’t as challenging as I thought and did make me feel prepared for the WRT102 class next semester, like accessing to the university’s library’s database, making a works cited page, and knowing the format for college papers. I actually liked this year’s writing class compared to the ones before, the topics are different and more interesting. My strengths in writing would be the organization of my ideas and how they are presented to the reader. Before I write, I would write out a simple outline for the paper. My

While writing is an essential part of a student’s success I managed to avoid papers as much as humanly possible. The reason I have avoided writing isn’t that I do not like to write but that I am not comfortable writing papers that are going to be graded because I have a hard time putting down what I am thinking so typically it is a grammatical mess. I often over use or do not use enough punctuation and have poor choice in wording. Throughout the next fifteen weeks my personal goal is to be able to write a paper with proper grammar and be able to balance my paper.

Over the course of this trimester, I’ve learned more about myself as a writer, than in the past three years of high school English classes combined. Prior to the class, my writing was sufficient but stagnant. I wasn't growing as a writer because I didn’t feel the need to. I saw writing as a timed objective, something to be completed as swiftly as possible. Since I had always received high grades on my

When going into this class this semester I knew it was going to be tough and that I would really have to up my writing level. In middle school we tried to use descriptive language when writing but most of us failed when attempting. I had heard in the past that Mr. Cambisios was a hard grader and really looked at detail. Once I heard that I knew I would have a hard time on my first drafts. I was told I did pretty well on the first draft of the first paper compared to what people from past years have gotten on theirs.

Ranging from syntax to learning how to fully comprehend Bloom's Taxonomy Level 3, to creating a Hook, to Say-Mean-Matter, to making a thesis/conclusion. Out of everything I wrote this year, my literary analysis paper was by far the absolute worst one I have written, without a doubt. Writing my literary analysis paper took me more, substantially more time than expected, even though I already had everything going, and was ready to start writing. I kept doubting myself, saying to myself, “ that is not what the song is saying,” and kept going through thousands upon thousands of ideas until I found one that I was satisfied with. Time was running out, 1 week to go, Friday night, I was sitting down on the floor putting all the words together. Then it struck me when those words hit: everyone, nightmares, repeat, problems, no heart, empathy, will not give up until everything is “right,” love, and pathetic. It was at that moment I realized what the song meant, and I was brimmed with excitement and went to take a shower and went to sleep because tomorrow was already today. For the course of that week, I spent most of it rushing through homework to get to English, focusing on the paragraphs, fixing every little detail in every sentence, and barely having time to add strong words to it in its final hours. Finally, the due date had arrived, and I was afraid of doing badly as there was a lot more to add than what was there, but nonetheless, time was not on my side I, and I turned it in. Checking back to the essay now, I realized that there is still much more to write than what was there, so many things I did not fixate

Finally, I’m in the big leagues now. I’m in high school, where everything just got ten times worse, I’m no longer given a prompt and told to just write about it. I have to put quotes in papers, have a works cited, have a bigger vocabulary, and just those things, but we even had word counts and a certain amount of pages that came into effect. I’m nonstop thinking about how I’m never going to make it with all of these new things coming into effect. My freshman year I have a paper due and I’m laying awake wondering as to why I procrastinated when I struggle with writing. Now I fear

My College Writing course last semester was my first writing class since high school in 2011. As you can imagine my writing skills were rusty, and I was not prepared. During my first day in class,

At the beginning of this class I was nervous on how this semester will go and whether or not I will succeed to my fullest potential in English. With that in my mind I still was trying my best to work at getting better, despite how much it made me cringe at the thought of it. My perspective of writing began to change as time went on, the assignments were based on interesting topics which made it a bit bearable for me. I’ve learned that you have to make the steps to get to the perfect paper. A paper requires you to brainstorm, make an outline, and writing your rough draft to get that feedback you need before finishing up that final draft. During this class I have also learned where to put my thesis and that I don’t need to have that three point subtopics of what you should talk about. The writing length started getting longer and I was a bit skeptical on how I can get to the word count or what will I talk about within my papers, but I have