My Writing As A Writer: A Personal Reflective Essay

While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.

In the beginning of the term I was assigned an essay that described me as a writer and thinker. With this essay being my first assignment, I was quite stressed with the feeling of failure. After this assignment I learned the importance of the drafting system. After my paper was graded I received it back and noticed multiple mistakes. This was the first step I practiced improving. Writing multiple drafts helped me analysis the material I wrote from another point of view. For example, I was able to eliminate sections that were unrelated from the main point. Building my vocabulary up another step I had focus as a writer and thinker. I used a combination between the dictionary and thesaurus to help me increase my vocabulary. Overtime with experience, I saw improvements in all of these categories that I was struggling

My attitude towards writing is very unfavorable. I just don’t enjoy it at all. It’s a very tedious task when you factor in all of the revision steps that it takes to produce a quality essay. Writing requires a long amount of time spent planning and preparing that is not for impatient people like myself. However, I believe that with a little bit of some confidence and patience, I could learn to enjoy myself when I write. I think it’s a great outlet for some but just hasn’t ever really been something that made me feel relaxed or stress-free. Writing just clouds my head with confusion and anxiety. I guess I can blame this on the fact that all my previous experiences writing has been academic and in a time-restricted environment. However, I am excited to see how my impression of writing changes throughout my college career now that I am not confined to a forty-minute window.

I learned that you are not only writing for your own benefit, your writing for your classmates, teachers and peers as well. It helps you gain common knowledge that you may not have known otherwise, as well as teaching us research skills that we will need later in life due to the rise is technology use. I have learned that research is a part of life and you will need it throughout college. Writing has helped me understand things I was unable to comprehend before, and gives me a feeling of capability. As Frederick Douglas, an African American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman, once wrote, “Thus, after a long, tedious effort for years, I finally succeeded in learning how to write” (McQuade and Atwan). At the beginning of the semester, I would have never guessed that I would finish this course on a positive note; however, I finished, and it was not as difficult as I thought it would

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.

At the beginning of the term, I came into this class not feeling very confident about my writing. I had taken writing classes in the past, but none to the extent of a college level writing course. One of the skills that I found I lacked the most was my vocabulary. While my writing structure was often not a problem my writing did not sound as sophisticated as it could be. I occasionally used a thesaurus but this would often cause problems as sometimes the words would not quite agree with the meaning of my sentence. Throughout the term the one thing that helped me the most with this problem were the workshops. As my peers corrected my paper they helped me to come up with more intelligent words to get my point across to the reader. I believe that without the inclusion of these workshops my essays would not have been as cleanly written.

When I first decided to take the class I didn't expect much from it, except for writing tons of essays each week. My expectations were not high because I knew it was another core class I had to get through. However, my expectations were completely overturned after taking this class for a semester. Instead of writing essays each week we had free writing, a walking journal, interesting articles to read, and most importantly lots of interaction with our peers. This class was nothing what I expected and I was really surprised how it turned out to be one of my favorite classes I have taken so far. I have learned so much about improving my writing and grammar, authors, techniques in writing, and even how to cope with stress and organize my thoughts back in order. I learned all about polemic and dialectic writing as

The most rewarding assignment from this class for me was the Individual Exploratory Project. This assignment allowed me to use the tools I learned from assignments before, such as adding voice and personality from the memoir and efficient researching from the rhetorical analysis. I really enjoyed this assignment because it was not written as a typical essay and allowed me to research each question I had as I went through my writing. I enjoyed this assignment because it also taught me that writing is an endless process of ideas and questions. It also helped me to continue developing skills for effectively searching for articles and responding to them.

My Writing Center session gave me ideas to improve my essay, and it helped me gain more confidence in my writing.

In the fall of 2016 I was enrolled in Susan Mills Comp. II course. During my time in this course we were tasked with several major assignments that were planned so we meet the student learning outcomes for the writing program. Some of these writing outcomes are 1.) Students use the writing process to compose with purpose, creating multimodal texts for various audiences, and 2.) Students productively interact with their peers, often in small groups, in the reiterative processes of feedback, revision, and editing. Throughout my time in this course I not only had a satisfying learning experience but enjoyed my time in Professor Mills’ course as well.

During this semester, I have learned a great deal about my own writing, and writing in general. One of the main takeaways from this course for me was how to break down the intricate process of writing papers. In addition, I developed viable skills regarding going into more in-depth detail during each step of the writing process. I enjoyed having the freedom to write about a topic that I was able to choose. This allowed me to research and write about something that actually interested me immensely. Having to work with one topic for the entire semester taught me how to find reliable resources and how to pick out the essential research from each article.

Throughout week eight which was looking at strategies for teaching writing as a group, we presented a well-rounded daily task to the discussion board, awaiting students in our learning group to respond. It 's these responses that will guide this section of the folio and my own personal reflection regarding my role in the group.

America is a place full of immigrants with no single ethnicity or race. America can also be referred to as the ?Melting Pot? because it consists ingredients of multicultural backgrounds. There are cultures such as French American, Asian American, Italian American and African American. I am Mexican American. My culture has helped me to become the writer I am today. My bicultural background and constant moving back and forth from Mexico to America has both influenced and weakened my writing. Although I was born in America, my Mexican culture has always been a part of my life. I have spent the majority of my life in Mexico, and Spanish is my first

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.

Over the course of this semester each paper that was written helped to introduce me and my fellow classmates to different formatting, and genres of writing. A lot of knowledge was gained from writing these papers and I was able to compare and contrast the disciplinary writings and notice what makes each of them stand out. Reflecting back on these individual papers helps to express what I have learned.