My Growing As A Writer

Over this quarter of English, I have learned many things out of the three to four essays that we have written. I have learned how to write college papers in the appropriate page requirements. Our teacher noticed after the first two essays we wrote that we suffered from sentence fragments, sentence run ons, and comma splices. I have learned how to fix those errors in my papers that I write. A thing I have learned about myself as a writer is that I write very well when a paper is about my personal life because it is easier to write about yourself than about a topic that you are just researching for the first time. If the paper is about my life experiences, I would get a good grade on 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.

The inevitable had happened; I, as a small child, was demanded to read. A little antisocial human being launched into a world of, at first, difficult words and lengthy phrases. While words and literacy were forced into my mind, I had reluctantly begun the adventure to enjoy and accept the art of literature. Later however, my hopes and dreams were crushed to pieces by a gruesome teacher with an interesting form of a so called “grading policy.”

From writing thoughtful poems to research papers, I have experienced composing a diverse portfolio of literary analysis and criticisms throughout the school year. I started out the year writing minimally. By the end of the year, I noticed I was able to express my ideas and thoughts in a more clear and concise way on paper. Ultimately, each composition allowed me to widen my horizons as a writer and see how I could improve as a writer.

My English Literature major has helped me to achieve an outstanding level of appreciation, enjoyment, and knowledge of both American and British Literature. As a high school AP English student, I struggled through great works like Hamlet and To the Lighthouse. My teacher’s daily lectures (there was no such thing as class discussion) taught me merely to interpret the works as critics had in the past. I did not enjoy the reading or writing process. As a freshman at Loras, I was enrolled in the Critical Writing: Poetry class. For the first time since grade school, my writing ability was praised and the sharing of my ideas was encouraged by an enthusiastic and nurturing professor. Despite the difficulty of poetry, I enjoyed reading it.

“ 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,

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,

I believe I have made tremendous progress as a writer from the beginning of the year. I feel as though I am a total different person as a writer than I was at the beginning of the year. I know I have made progress in the area of citing sources and knowing whether or not the sources are reliable or not. I think I have come along way from the beginning of this course.

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.

As this semester comes to a close, I have become to realize how much I’ve grown as a writer. After taking this class, I have noticed that I have gained more and more of a voice in my writing. When faced with having to write about subjective topics, I have learned how to voice my opinions in papers in order to make them more effective. My writing has greatly evolved because of this class. Not only has it shown me I have to work on sentence variety, but it has also allowed me to work on word choice which is something I have always struggled with throughout my high school career. Struggling with how to put things into words as exactly how I see them has been a struggle for me throughout this course. Despite how much I’ve grown as writer, I have

Rain is crucial to all living things from every walk of life. Rain brings destruction and regrowth, leaving a clean slate and a new beginning. I selected this theme because while the focal point and characters change throughout my writing the constant idea throughout my pieces consisted of moving on, growing, and starting a new beginning. I think that lately my writing has been full of an unknown tone, an excitement/ fear of growing up and starting over. I believe this is all because I've reached a point in my life where I’m going to college and moving away. I’m delighted to be able to go out on my own and experience new things, but it’s kind of nostalgic to know that my childhood is coming to a close. However I’m aware that not all people

My growth as a writer has been going uphill since the very first mini paper. I came to Heartland Community College thinking, I was an okay writer. They told me when I took the placement test I wrote a college level but I didn’t see it myself. I would look at other classmates work and be kind of upset with myself for not making the same choices they did. Maybe I could have changed a word or maybe talked about a different subject and try to not go off topic so much. Well if it wasn’t a Gladwell paper because he tends to go off topic in his papers. The break up letter took me so long to do, I was so nervous because I didn’t want to sound like a high school kid and get a bad great for not pushing myself to the next level.

Throughout my life, the English language has acted as something much more than a communicative tool. Because I emigrated from Germany to the US when I was almost five years old, my adoption and ongoing usage of the English tongue has connoted a change of cultural, and even personal, identity in my life. I did not know one word of English when I arrived in the US in 2004, and so, as I learned English, thus I became familiar with the new life I would live on the other side of the Atlantic. I quickly became fluent in English and entered public school after one year of preschool. I remember that, for the first hundred days of kindergarten, I did not utter one word. This was not due to a lack of English ability, but rather to my shyness and the fact that I was still acquainting myself to the norms of existence in the US. Following this, my shyness

Have you ever been given an assignment where you say to yourself, “how the heck am I going to do this?” or maybe, “what am I supposed to write about?” Well that’s exactly how I felt, thought, and did with this writing journey. Coming up with something to say about my writing journey has been difficult. I would be bold enough to say nearly impossible. So impossible it’s like trying to get a camel through the eye of a needle. Okay that might be an exaggeration, but it has been difficult. The idea that I have a writing journey I understand. But thinking of an event or something that has made my writing the way it is has been difficult. So, what I’ve decided to do then is to write about my writing journey writing this paper.