Final Reflection Essay
Throughout this semester, I have seen an improvement in my writing skills and the way I develop my essays. I have always had a passion for creative writing, but when writing academic papers, I lacked technique and correct grammar. I made exceptional grades on my writing assignments in high school, but I learned quickly that English college classes are much more challenging. Being in my first college English class helped me learn how important class attendance and participation are, along with learning the many rules and techniques used in writing. Seeing the improvement in my writing over the course of this semester has made me very optimistic of the English classes I will take in the future. This class has taught me how important grammar is and how I should always strive for improvement in my writing. Class participation was a big part of making good grades and helping my writing skills increase. Going to class as much as I could was a large part of getting everything I could out of the class time. Attendance is very important to ensure that no information or assignment announcements are missed. With the presentations and teaching Dr. Kennedy provided along with the online resources, I learned something new during every class period I attended. I enjoyed the various ways assignments were given to teach in different. When we did assignments in groups, it enabled me not only to voice my own opinion, but to be able to hear how the other
With the anxiety flowing throughout my body, I knew the time was near of facing my English 1301 class. Being told that I needed to improve my writing during my grade school days, I knew that I didn’t feel at ease going into a college level English class. But, with this in mind I had to pull myself together to encounter the challenges that I will face. However, having the privilege of having an amazing professor I believe my writing skills improved, also I was able to find my confidence.
The writing ability of me, Jack Consolla, has improved quite well throughout the semester. I have written almost every single type of essay and have gone into detail about them and have also gone into detailed stylistic learning about grammar uses. I feel as if I’m more ready for college and can’t wait to get the ball
Throughout this semester I have learned many valuable resources, and tools. The big thing you taught us was how to write and argument paper. Also I have learned different tools on summarizing, how to better my skills for peer reviews, new library skills, and MLA format. Most of these I already knew, but you taught us them more in depth, and you gave me better understandings of them.
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.
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.
Over the course of this semester I learned a lot about myself as a writer. This English 101 class has really allowed me to expand my essay structure and ways of thinking. This was my first college writing course and it has given me much more freedom when writing because in high school I felt limited and like what we were writing was not very important. In high school I would write essays to just to fulfill the required word or page count and to a degree I still feel like this but maybe that is why I am an engineering major but in this course I actually was able to express my ideas and for the first time really test the limits of my writing capabilities. I really enjoyed being able to incorporate my voice more in my essays and I believe
There are many different things a person can do to improve their skills as a writer. Some are as simple as read more and write a lot. A good strategy that I use is to write down all of my ideas as soon as I think of them. Having these written down helps because they can inspire me and help me go directly into writing. That blank piece of paper staring at you may be intimidating, but don’t think about it, just start writing. A really good way to improve your writing skills is to practice.
Writing is not a profession for me, it's more like a path to reach Zen. I'm a budding creative writer who focusses on coming up with meaningful contents which can help my readers in some way or the other. So, needless to say, I don't do crappy jobs at all.
My biggest area of improvement this year as a writer was my style and structure. Last year, in English I, we learned a writing technique called “The Evidence Sandwich”. It was a basic claim, evidence, commentary, structure for writing body paragraphs. This was helpful when I was a freshman, but as a grew as a writer sophomore year, this made my writing sound static and robotic. As my writing progressed through the school year, I started breaking free from that structure, enabling me to add flow and style to my writing, while still maintaining the requirements for a successful body paragraph. Meanwhile, my writing started shifting from pure summary to actual literary analysis. These changes transformed my writing into more improved and polished papers. A challenge I faced this year was my writing process and my work ethic. At first I was very excited about the amount of essay writing time we had in class. However, as the year continued, I found the stress of sophomore year and all my other classes clouding my focus. This made it very hard to sit down in class and work on my essay without reaching to my other binder. I feel that if I had worked harder to focus in class and get more work done, my essays would have been much better because I would have had more material to revise ahead of time and ask Ms. Hursh questions on, and less work to do the night before the deadline. Next year, I will aim to use my time in class wisely so I have more time at home to focus on college and other junior year items.
My final reflection paper is an overview of what l have learnt during the semester, by figuring out what I didn’t do right and my reason for having a low score grade on my essay, and what l intended to do for a better grade in my next English class.
During the summer of 2017 I was able experience my first experience of college level english, as it has been known, it's not easy. College level English was definitely gonna be tricky, since I kinda knew what to except, and I knew my writing skills were not the best. I knew for a fact that I have bad grammar issues it's how it's always been for me and it did show on the first difficult assignment I was assigned. Every assignment was important but the paper take the crown on utmost important since they make up most of your grade. On my first assignment I was asked to create a narrative about an experience in my life.The expeireince for the narrative had to cover no more than an entire day if possible. The day I was given the assignment, I went home and immediately started to brainstorm ideas. The brainstorming process was no easy task. I had a few ideas in my head but i wanted to go and try to organize them as much as possible before I began to start writing my paper. I used a master note set up where I would first outline how the story would be laid out and then I'd go into adding further details to support each of the paragraphs. The only feedback I was able to get was If the story was acceptable. After my research I began to start writing out my rough draft. I did do some research on narrative papers to try to get an idea of how to go about presenting my story. My first story was very narrowed down because I had a feeling I could not tell the best story
Throughout this course, I discovered just how bad a writer I was. At the very beginning we had to introduce our selves. There was a small section in that paragraph where I mentioned that I hate writing essay. I mentioned that I’ve never been good at them and I rarely got good scores. However, I feel as though I have greatly improved my writing skills during this course. I’ve picked up several rules and have made the most out of this class. I am very proud of myself and the work I have put forth into this class in efforts of improving my essay writing skills.
Over the course of this semester, I grew immensely as a writer. I have learned what my weak points are as a writer, what my strengths are, and how I can revise a paper using resources. I have learned how to organize my thoughts and give clear, vivid details. Also, I have learned that the paper is only as good as the ideas behind it. Throughout this semester, all aspects of my writing have changed.
Before I took my first college-level english course, I’d only had to do research for an essay on several occasions, and even then they weren’t even close to as long as the one I’ve written most recently. Up until now, all of my language arts classes were filled with things that I already knew, easy things that didn’t require me to change my writing style much, which likely explains why they were so boring. My approach to writing has changed throughout the process of taking an English 101 class.
English has always been my second least favorite subject. No matter it will always be a subject I don’t like because of all the writing. Since junior year in high school however, I think I have been enjoying it a lot more. Throughout this class I learnt new things, not a lot of new thing, but new important things. I have improved in my use of quotations, something I have struggled with since sophomore year of high school. I still have hiccups from time to time, but that’s just part of the writing process. All the revising made me realize I make a lot of the same mistakes in each paper, so I should work harder to eliminate those mistakes all together. We wrote a lot of things, we revised a lot of things, but the essay I will be talking about are Writing Task B and Essay 1. These two essays mark two different stages in this class and I am going too discuss how I went about writing these and how the final product, in my own opinion, came out.