My Reflection On My Writing As A Late Bloomer

I am a first-generation American, but due to my family’s constant moving between the U.S. and Mexico, I did not learn English till the age of 10—so around the 5th grade. I was in ESL courses in middle school. And eventually moved on to regular English in high school and soon enough became an English honor student. But even then, I experienced great difficulty writing papers, primarily because I struggled with thesis statements. Reading comprehension is not difficult, especially not, because I have a tendency of underlining and annotating. Now, after graduating from community college, I do believe I am a better writer, but I do believe there will always be room for improvement.

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

“The Novice as Expert: Writing the Freshman Year” reflected my writing experience while I transitioned from elementary writer to a critical writer. Sommers and Saltz write, “freshmen need to see themselves as novice in a world that demands ‘something more and deeper’ from their writing than high school” (Sommers and Saltz 134). This line highlights the hardship that most students face when trying to write successfully. My earlier written works were much weaker than my current pieces because I often wrote for the sake of passing the class. While developing my writing, I focused on the new ideas that were introduced rather than limiting my argument to familiar techniques and ideas. Because of my new attitude towards writing, I began to demand

There was many steps that helped me improve in this class including drafts and peer-evaluation worksheets. Having a rough draft is one of the best ways to help me improve on my essays because it gives me a professional eye to see the problems that I’m not able to. Discussing the prompts of our essays had benefited me because it gave me a sense of direction of where I should start and another perspective. Peer-evaluation worksheets are also one of the great tools used to improve my writing because it gave me a different approach on my essay that is by peers. They wrote some particularly useful revisions I should make to increase the value of my writing. By having a rubric to follow as guidelines had immensely improved

When writing my papers in English I was never sure what topic, I wanted to write about. I rotated between two, one being “The Mistreatment of Animals in Zoos” and the second and my main topic being “Is College Worth the Cost.” When writing these papers, I noticed something about myself. I had grown as a writer compared to when I first walked into English 1100, I had some writing experience but not much my grammar lacked and I was the queen of sentence fragments. Throughout the semester during English 1100, my writing skills improved. From learning, how to format works cited page correctly to learning how to analyze a source. My writing improved wonders with each paper. My paper I, I struggled extremely with formatting issues and how to

In my childhood I was not taught the fundamentals of proper writing. Nor was it influenced in my household to dedicate time for writing. My father owned his own business, therefore, I always saw him writing inventory and receipts. As for my mother, I can recall her writing down messages from phone calls. At school I found little to no growth in my writing. When I did face a task that required legible writing I would seek help from my friend Sandra. This class is by far the first English course I have taken were I could truly say lectures are broken down enough for me to develop satisfactory growth. I am still a developing writer, but I have made a lot of progress because of influences of my own desire to learn, Professor Anna C. Morrison, and

It is essential to understand that classes taken in grade school do not give students a full understanding of each subject. With the topic of writing, there will always be a new lesson to learn, an aspect to improve, or a differing way to explain. Author Craig Vetter states in Bonehead Writing, “This is your enemy: a perfectly empty sheet of paper. Nothing will ever happen here except what you make happen.” Each story, essay, or response comes from a writer’s experiences. With each attempt at a new piece comes an underlying story of emotions the writer is facing. Each person’s writing is unique and the ideas people have are related to their past experiences and what they believe to be familiar with when deciding which writing style to use. As a high school student, I have learned many things about writing that helped me become the improved writer I am today, but the most essential advice I have received is practice makes perfect. Although there is no actual perfect way of writing, I have discovered that each essay I write, my writing improves. It is easier to spot mistakes, find areas to improve, and ponder elevated word choice to use.

My opportunities that I am still needing to work on is my quotes and ensuring that they are in the correct format, I had a better result on my grade this time for what I did accomplish on the format but I still missed some minor items to properly place my quote in the text. Also, I did have a run on sentence in my introduction which I overlooked during my proofreading. Finally, as for any particular attention to my next essay I felt that Dr. Bean was hinting at the details of the little errors that I made on my essay.

My Reaction to Writing Professional freelance writer and writing teacher, Bakari Chavanu, claims, “As with any other skill (and art), writing takes practice” in her article, “7 Reasons Why Most People Find Writing Hard to Do.” I enjoy this quote because I used to struggle with writing; specifically, formal writing was the most difficult for me. Although stressful, Freshman Comp class has taught me how to do the following: use metacognition, research and cite textual evidence, strategize, and transition. At first, I was intimidated by the high expectations of this class and the transition into college-level writing.

Throughout this semester there are many skills that I have noticed have improved through the constant writing of essays for this class. The one that I find most noticeable is a habit I had long struggled with which was essentially my tendency to be over necessarily wordy when writing my essays. I believe that I was able to somewhat fix this subconsciously, just by knowing that I was no longer in high school, and could no longer get by with just attempting to fill up my word count. I also believe I have greatly improved in my topic selection. In high school I would throw caution to the wind and just pick whatever topic came to mind just in an effort to get it done. I have been much more calculated in college, and I believe that it has helped me write better essays. While these were the

The beginning of the semester my writing was weak. When I got assignments for grammar, punctuation, and sentence style I was satisfactory when I turned them in. When I write my essays and turned them in they were satisfactory. Then the second eight week started then I knew I had to advance my grammar, punctuation and sentence style. I can now reflect back to the beginning and see how much I have advance in my writing. I notice that my strengths are vocabulary and the structure of my essays, and my only weakness is my grammar that I need to work on a lot.

Writing was a difficult part of literacy for me growing up. I never really liked writing nor did I think I was any good at it. First, I had a hard time thinking of what to write let alone how to get those thoughts on the paper. Even when the teacher provided us with prompts I had a hard time thinking of how to tackle the thoughts I had or simply I didn’t have any thoughts on the topic. I floundered in writing for many years. I took a creative writing class in high school and enjoyed it. However, outside of that class I lacked the professional writing skills that my teachers wanted to see, such as indentations, punctuation and spelling. I had no organizational skills and my papers were choppy at best. At some point, someone, can’t recall who, told me to write

An aspect that I often struggle with is proper punctuation. Truthfully, I do not know how to correctly use punctuation. When writing, I place punctuation by mimicking authors’ formats or by placing them where it feels right. This is present in all of my writing, but I am attempting to improve. Punctuation also plays a part in another weakness of mine, one that is most likely present within this essay. Since middle school, it was engrained in my mind that a good essay is a long essay, so I have a tendency for wordiness. To elongate an essay, I tend to add needless words and sentences. For example, in the rough draft of the Whole Process Essay, I added several unrelated occurrences to elongate the paragraphs. Although my essays were long and wordy, the professor commented on vagueness and unclearness within the whole process and practice essay. Sometimes, I disregard the fact that the reader might not know what it is I am writing about or the sentence makes perfect sense to me. The latter is the most common, I quickly read the sentence and it appears fine to me. Within the Whole Process Essay, another weakness was brought to my attention. I lack structure, a key element in effective writing. Within the same essay and a few others, I simply added what felt right, sometimes the result would be acceptable but in other instances, it was a long, jumbled mess.

I have been writing since I have been in Middle School. I have realized that by college it was easier for me to write down my thoughts in order for me to remember what I have said or done. Writing out my thoughts gives me a sense of recollection, knowledge, and pacification that gets me through my day. I pictured writing to be as simple as jotting down a few sentences, but as I got farther in school I realized that there is more to it than just writing sentences. English has been my most difficult subject I have ever endured, but I have somehow been managing to make excellent grades and achieving all requirements. First in the essay, I will discuss my experiences in the English life that I’ve taken so far up until college. The second part will list my struggles in creating a thesis, a work cited, and properly citing my sources used in the papers.

Writing has always been something I dread. It’s weird because I love talking and telling stories, but the moment I have to write it all down on paper, I become frantic. It’s almost as if a horse race just begun in my mind, with hundreds of horses, or words, running through my mind, unable to place them in chronological order. Because I struggle to form satisfying sentence structure, it takes me hours, sometimes even days, to write one paper. It’s not that I think I’m a “bad writer,” I just get discouraged easily. Needless to say, I don’t think highly of my writing skills. When I was little I loved to both read and write. I read just about any book I could get my hands on, and my journal was my go to for my daily adventures. Although it’s