Personal Narrative: A Change In My Writing

As the semester comes to a close, it is always interesting to look back and reflect on the events and opportunities my English class has given me throughout my first semester as a whole. At the beginning of this semester it was evident that I was feeling uncomfortable due to the adjustment that I was going through as a student moving to college. It was very difficult expressing myself through my writing since I was nervous about good impressions and my good grade. While this class was one of the most difficult courses that I have taken this far, it has become quite evident to me that I have grown a substantial amount as a writer and as a person; Especially, when it came to explaining my ideas, writing academic essays, and making arguments.

How can I become a better writer? Throughout my writing experiences, I have learned I have many weaknesses along with strengths. My experiences with writing has not always been the best, but over time, with lots of practice and instructions from my instructors, I can proudly say that I have gained a better understanding on the layout of essays and papers. As well as understanding how to write correctly my goal as a writer is to learn how to overcome my weaknesses and use my strengths to my highest ability. I have many strengths, weaknesses and goals that I plan to achieve and overcome in my college career.

In Freshman Composition I learned what metacognition means, and how it applies to academic writing. Next I learned about textual evidence and backing up your opinions with research. *I expect this class to help develop my writing skills, as well as find my voice in writing, all together I expect this class to be challenging but rewarding. Therefore I have set a few goals for myself, my first goal is to step out of my comfort zone and research topics I have never heard of before. My second goal is to not second-guess myself on my writing topics and/or choices. Furthermore I expect great things to come from this

My experiences as a writer have been both very engrossing and strenuous. I have learned a great quantity on both reading and writing, though, I continue to struggle on things that I have learned by this time, making the same mistakes that I do not even realize. Sometimes things are not so easy to understand when reading information, especially if the wording of an article is difficult for example. I love the idea of learning new things everyday. These past years as a writer have been very interesting, and I have learned and grasped many concepts I have been taught along the way.

Throughout the course of freshmen year I have developed different skills and opinions on writing. I feel I have created a more mature style of writing and a better understanding of literature. I have changed my view of writing over this semester and acquired a strong liking for it. The importance of writing has become more visible throughout the past few months. Writing is crucial in many aspects of a person’s life. I have grown to be a more powerful and well built writer throughout this course.

My writing has changed a lot throughout the year. Some of my first pieces included lots of redundancies, “th” words, and things that could be changed. In addition, the sentences were not as long as they could have been. These things were brought to my attention by reviewing my writing and using the writing goal sheet. Over the semester, I have learned these little mistakes separate lower level writing from higher level writing. Reviewing my old writing and writing instruction has recently been on my mind while I write essays. They help me to write to the best of my ability. The first sentence of my essay at the beginning of the year is, “I am thirteen years old and I am interested in building and designing things.” This sentence has redundancy

Over the course of this semester, I have learned many things to improve my writing. Having taken the course before, this semester has been an excellent opportunity to expand on my existing knowledge. Although I had written many essays before, there is still much to be learned and improved. Two factors of writing that I had learned or improved on this semester were transitions/topic sentences and how to properly structure a conclusion paragraph.

How long was I going to continue to ignore the fact that I desperately needed help with my writing? Reflecting back even in high school it seems I’ve always had the same problems when it came to my writing. Maybe it was the fact that I was too lazy to take the extra time out to write out a rough draft, unless of course it counted towards my grade, or maybe it was the fact that I never paid attention to my grammar because I was always rushing. Either way it goes once I got to college I realized I wasn’t going to be able to skate by with just putting my initial ideas on paper and turning them in, if I really wanted to get a good grade I would have to work for it.

This is the 25 minute writing challenge, where I’m not allowed to use the backspace button on my keyboard or edit what I’m typing. There are probably going to be many typos in this small paper, but that’s apart of the challenge as I can't edit anything. I honestly have no clue what to write about, but atleast I’m 3 minutes in right now.

The process I used when writing previously changed during the first few weeks of this class. Already I have altered the way I write my drafts, and the way I read other people’s work. Lamott’s “Shitty First Draft” made me come to the realization that one draft isn’t always the best approach. Therefore, I took multiple steps in examining my draft and critiquing it accordingly. Additionally, I started brainstorming topics, and this led me to create a roadmap for the list of destinations and topics I wanted to touch on and the message I wanted the reader to take away. This is just the beginning of the year and I already have a sense that as I progress through the semester my work will be continually get better.

As I read the comments on my Instagram post, I laugh. I had posted a picture from when I was little, so of course, my friends had to make sarcastic comments on it. While I was reading them I noticed words like “lol”, “tho”, and “bc”. I was five in the picture and I was not taught to write like that. No one was. We were taught to read beyond our level, write grammatically correct, spell right, and speak clearly. Well at least that was what my sister, Riley, taught me when we turned her bedroom into a classroom and played school. Riley is two years ahead of me in school. When she would come home, she would teach me what she learned that day. I loved playing school and it gave me an appreciation for reading and writing because we did it for fun. This also allowed me to strive for more than average since she was teaching me things the others wouldn’t learn for a couple of years.

Reading these pages and the documents were interesting and they definitely helped me realize my mistakes in my writing. I always get nervous whenever I write an essay and it stresses me out if I made a lot of mistakes.

In this semester my achievement of improving my writing skills has increased significantly. My sentence lengths vary in a positive manner along with my word choice improving, becoming more complex and of writing expectation. My main struggle this semester would be the peer editing. Although I have improved significantly I still find it difficult to edit others papers. Further more than the common spelling and grammatical errors. I believe my essays have improved drastically from the beginning of the semester towards the end.

I believe it is important for any student who wants to do their best in a class to take a moment to evaluate their own work to determine the rate their writing is progressing and how they can continue to advance their writing. When I looked through my own work I asked myself “what have I learned this semester?” and “what do I still need to learn in order to improve my writing?”. Answering both these questions will help me with my last step of my self-evaluation, developing a plan to learn new skills.

“The past is where you learned the lesson.” Mistakes happen to everyone. Some change you for better or for worse, but all mistakes give you a lesson. These lessons help you form your identity and how you are viewed by others. With this you can either succeed or fail. One of my mistakes that changed me for the better was taking a break from softball.