Reflective Essay On English Class

Writing is one of the most important skills that I have learned throughout my years in school. I have learned that no matter how much I love or hate it, writing is a necessity; I might as well try to be good at it. Writing has been in my life for many years. There are many types of writing, educational writing and personal writing are two that I will mention in this essay. I have learned how to allow writing to help me in my daily life. When I began writing I hated it, however, I have learned the many uses of it, and it has become a huge part of my life.

While writing might seem like a simple task, it can be a daunting task for a lot of people. Sometimes it can be hard to express the ideas in your mind in the words of a paper. This results in a disconnect with what a writer may actually think. A great writer is one that can transform his thoughts into words perfectly. This is a craft that takes many years to perfect, which is why writing is troublesome for a lot of us. Many students also have had bad experiences with writing. Maybe they had a teacher that didn’t try to support them and their writing. They might not have ever gotten the help they needed and may feel that they are in a hole where their writing can’t get better. At this point, they just accept that their writing will never get better.

My relationship with writing is hard, my writing doesn’t always flow well. My writing also doesn’t always come easily to me. More often than not, I have to sit and think for long periods of time, for to come up with ideas on how to start my essays. When I start with paper and pen my hand will start aching, and that makes it difficult to concentrate on what I am trying to express through my writing as it takes my mind off what I am currently thinking of writing down. Writing is the course I have always struggled with the most throughout high school, and through my first year of college.

English class has never been my strong suite. I always had to work twice as hard in English then I did in any other class. Writing paper always had me stressed and overwhelmed, I felt discouraged in my work. l never seemed to be able to get to the level I wanted to. I would try my hardest and paid attention in class, but when it came to writing the paper none of that seemed to help. I think that my experience in English Composition 1 has helped gain and grow in some areas, but I don’t think that it highlights a well-written college essay. Some elements that I worked to improving was introduction paragraphs, tone, style, and thesis statements.

Essays have always seemed like just another assignment. Rarely did I like doing them and most of the time I did not like the prompt. Essays were straight forward and very dull. You were given a question about something in class and told to write about it. So far college English has been different. The class takes an abstract point of attack. There is still a prompt but is about more complex and controversial issues. This would have to make me think critically and in an unorthodox manner. This, however, was not my main worry. At the beginning of the year I had two major concerns going into a college level English class. Grammar and mechanics, those are the two words that have always been brought up in parent-teacher conferences or written in red ink on my paper. I was not very worried about making a thesis or analyzing quotes. One thing I rarely did in high school was revision. It was either last minute or I thought the essay was already good enough. The first essay was proof of a lack of revisions. The prompt asked us to take our rough draft, revise it, than make more revisions to that paper so that it can become your final copy. I did not make an attempt to do a revised copy. I did however revise my first draft and went straight the final essay. During this process my analyzing could always be more in depth (clarity was also an issue through out primary and secondary education). Although receiving a slightly better grade on my first paper, it had more mistakes and had less

When I graduated high school, I already knew that I wanted to attend college other than going to the work force. I heard stories about college being fun and it is one of the greatest accomplishment a person can achieve. So, I began college right after high school. As I entered college, I learned that I will have to focus more on writing papers than having fun. In high school my teachers did not prepare me for college essays. I feel like I learned a lot more failing on my college writing assignment than passing on the essays in high school. Well now I have approached the end of the semester of college, and I am exhausted from the constant writing assignments. Although the assignments were difficult like I said it was also helpful. Each assignment helped me in different ways. The assignments helped me improved with my grammar, time management, and how to process before I begin writing. In English 1010 I had different types of writing assignments. I had to write a literacy narrative paper, analysis paper, research paper, and lastly an autoethnography paper which I am doing now. An autoethnography is when the author uses self reflects to write about their experiences about writing a paper. English is not the only subject that I had writing assignments in. I also had to write assignment in my business class. My English teacher had informed me that I will have to do an autoethnography. So, I used my paper in my business class to reflect on how I write by

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,

The relationship that I have with writing is complicated and we don’t always get along. Although we tend to make up even when I get frustrated and want to quit. When being assigned a paper I struggle with what to write. My words seem to never come out the way I would like and I’m always having to start over and over again. It starts to get frustrating after a while. Needless to say writing isn’t one of my favorite things to do but it’s apart of our everyday lives like texting, sending emails, posting on Facebook, Twitter, and so on. I personally have only used texting as my main daily form of writing since I graduated high school. So therefore I would like to refresh my memory of what I learned in high school and widen my use of writing while in this writing course.

One of the things I feel very strongly about is writing. I like how you can say whatever you want knowing that it is your opinion. You have freedom over what you say. Some things that are written could be seen as controversial, but in the scheme of things, most of what is said is okay because at the end of the day you have the right to freedom of speech. Personally writing is an escape from life, whether it is full of pain, sadness, chaos, or just plain boredom. A few years ago my imagination was bright. It held quite a bit of good ideas, but somewhere along the way to now I lost most of that ability to think of the most random plot lines or ideas to write about. My creativity slowly burned out, kind of like a candle. Then one morning not too

Hi Shiloh! I want to thank you for reminding us that writing is a process. It is also good for me to take note as I am starting out in my professional writing career. Although I didn't coin the term 'limited' in my post, we described our professional writing experiences as limited. We laid out a brief overview of our experiences coming from different premises other than the prompt. I recall my experiences in the form of a short bio, implying that I have done anything but creative writing. From what I comprehend, you list your experience to support the importance of the process. In contrast, you took a philosophical turn, challenging a misconceived notion that writing is about the act of writing.

‘Helping students meet the challenges of academic writing’ by Fernsten and Reda is an interesting study how reflective writing practices can be useful for marginalized students, who are struggling with “negative writer self-identity. The possible causes according to Fernsten & Reda are, “issues such as race, class and gender that are marginalized factors for many basic writers”, in addition to the expectations of the dominant academic culture. However, even though Fernsten & Reda illuminated the ‘potential conflicts’ within the academic world, they have failed to provide conclusive evidence that supports their argument regarding their solution. Their reliance on dated research that provides a one sided historical perspective, may

The learning style I identified with is read/write. I basically learn things better by reading and writing things down. As you read and write things down it makes it easier for me to remember things better. If I continuously re-read things, I would remember them for a long time. And if I re-write things I’d be ably to remember it for a long time as well. Because I remember better if I read I always keep a highlighter near by because if I highlight something I know it’ll be important and it will make it easier for studying for test. Not only that, because I use different colored highlighters it makes me remember things more also. Yes, I did know that this was my preferred learning style before completing this assessment because,

Over the course of this past semester, my ability to write has improved tremendously. Prior to undertaking this course, my expertise in writing was not as fine-tuned as it should have been. I had never previously been enrolled in a class specifically tailored to writing-- which was quite clear. Upon reading my past works, it becomes apparent that my writing style consisted of fluff, small words, and inconsistently structured sentences. These problems have, for the most part, been remedied with the coursework I have tackled in College Writing. Rather than long, drawn out papers that take an eternity to reach the primary point, my recent work is much nicer in terms of composition and grammar. I credit these improvements to the three primary

When I first started college I did not know what to expect with an English class. I liked writing about topics that interested me, but high school did not allow me to do that. I took American History and we would have to write

English class seemed to be the most dreadful to take within school. Writing essays for most of my grade in a class is not what I was looking forward too. When I entered college I knew that it would be one of many challenging classes I would have to take. Starting from the lowest English class to moving on up, the writing assignments became longer and more thought out. The time came when I got into this class that I knew more work was going to have to be put into essays and thus brought out what I had not seen before in my work progress.