Personal Narrative: Improving My 7th Grade Writing Skills

I have truly enjoyed writing for most of my life and after this class I will continue to enjoy writing hopefully with more skill. I have always viewed myself as a fairly strong writer and this class has reaffirmed that for me, but it has also shown weaknesses in my writing. As an introduction level class this has been one of my favorites; at some point I will take a higher level, even though it is not required for my major. Even though this class is almost over I am continuing to learn. I also love that this class will help me with literally ever other class in my college career. I am not a particularly strong reader, but as my writing skills improve so do the reading skills. While in this class I have learned a lot about everything from what I can improve, to subjects that interest me, and constructing a successful paper.

“I would be honored to invite Demetri Ford and his little sister, Tiana Ford, to the stage!”

My writing experiences have been minimal. So far I have only learned the basics of writing, like forming sentences and forming sentences to put into paragraphs. I can tell that my writing has improved throughout the years. I hope to improve in writing essays, paragraphs, stories, and speeches so that I have no errors with editing and creating the final product. I predict that I will be a well rounded writer when I graduate from Newman University.

Having to write about my own literacy is hard to do, first of all it’s hard to recall things that happened when you were a child let alone when I started to read and write, I remember going to school playing, the teacher reading to us, making vowel sounds and learning to write my name; I recall the teacher giving out the spelling list and taking it home to practice before Friday’s test, I would go to school hoping and praying that I would not misspell any words; as usual I missed a couple of words and I knew what that meant.

Prior to entering class, I thought that I was a competent writer. However, I quickly learned that my writing was conversational and that I had little experience in academic writing. I became aware that much of my poor writing was like an old habit that I found humbling to admit and hard to correct. Passive voice, unneeded words, long sentences, were just a few of the obstacles that resulted in ineffectual writing. However, using peer reviews and an editing checklist I slowly began the journey to better writing. I also found that reading about writing provided supplementary methods to improve my writing. Implementing these new techniques, I slowly began to understand what scholarly writing entailed. As I learned through giving criticism

Back in high school my teacher for advanced placement language class would automatically give the top student high grades, but for students like me we were not looked at with any improvement. This put a permanent “You are not a good writer” in my mindset before every time I would sit down to write a paper. Even to this day I still lack confidence in writing, so I am going to have a positive attitude and challenge my weaknesses throughout this semester. The four learning goals stated will help evolve my writing skills and are extremely important to achieve success in this english course. My personal goals for this semester is to receive an A on each paper, build confidence to share my writing to others, and to have good time management skills for submitting papers. I know we will be taught different forms of writing throughout the semester and techniques to go along with it, but from prior experience I think I am at some sort of advantage with writing. I currently have a marketing major, so I do believe that persuasive writing and tools such as rhetoric will help me be a successful sales representative in the

After filling out the Writing Skills Inventory, I noticed that I rarely created a plan to help me stay organized while writing. In this paper I will explain how and why I am going to improve my writing skills by planning my essays prior to starting it. Creating a plan could include a couple of things, it could help me create a process for completing the assignment or it could help the ideas within the assignment flow better and stay in order. I want to improve this skill because I often procrastinate on my tasks, so I do not have time to really construct solid ideas and take time to revise and edit as much I should. The reason that I do not plan out my assignments is that I think that it would be faster and easier to just write it all in

Through this assignment, I have learned some new writing skills and recalled some of the writing strategies I learned from my previous writing courses at UC Davis. For instance, I learned that free-write is a good technique in writing because it allows writers to write down all their ideas without judging them. I will definitely apply this technique in my future assignments not only in this course, but also other courses that require me to write.

My experience with writing has been very up and down because I have a hard time focusing on the topic. I would say that’s something I need to honestly work on because my attitude is if I'm not into it then I'm not doing it simple. Some of my past teachers in high school said that I could write but I honestly don’t know about now. I'll admit that I've gotten lazy in the sense that if I'm not into the work then I'll just pass it with a D or just retake it. I need to get out of that and just suck it up and get it over and done with.

I can still remember my heart pounding out of my chest. It was my first time in Writing 1, and my nerves were mostly the result of a friend’s advice. Winter quarter, my friend told me about her struggles in her writing class and she advised me not to take Professor Bernstein for Writing because as she said “he is really tough and a very hard grader.” However, I had no other option but to take writing with Professor Bernstein because all the other writing 1 classes conflicted with my schedule. Nevertheless, nine weeks have past since I first stepped foot in Writing 1, and I can certainly say that I have learned more than I ever expected. Yes, it is true, this class has been a challenge like no other, especially for me, being that English is

Thank you for your helping with my case. I am so glad that I don’t need to add another reading and writing class in this semester.

On the first day of class, having forgotten how to write over the blazing summer, I had high hopes I would gain some writing skill. Over the course of the last 10 weeks I learned not only that I am an extreme procrastinator, but that I had a lot to learn in the writing world. I learned many things about writing, including grammar, organization, and expression. Through late nights studying and practice in class, I can proudly say I'm a better writer than I was before.

I have never been much of a writer, but I can’t say I completely hate it. For as long as I can remember, I was always one of the kids that would sigh when a teacher assigned an essay for the class. One reason for having a dislike towards writing was because it takes a lot of thought and time to even think of how to begin. However, as I grew older, I came to the conclusion that writing isn’t all that bad. I actually found writing quite interesting when I get the chance to write about something that I strongly care about. So writing to me is bittersweet, depending on if it’s something that interests me or not.

My earliest experience with reading and writing were traumatizing especially when I was in the first grade. I still recall the experience I went through to this day. It made me really hate myself because the other kids were making fun of me.

Sitting here i think about how absolutely terrible my writing skills are and I ponder on what I could possibly write about.10 things about one topic seems kind of difficult to think of when you have to have interest in the topic yourself. Last night I sat in my bed thinking of the easiest thing for me to write about and that is my stress. It’s something I can really talk about and actually put thought into. The ten things that stress me out most would have to be the following; feeling alone, getting the short end of the stick in most situations, my mom going to rehab, working for everything I have, emotionally and physically, how my sister gets treated by her boyfriend, my dad's feelings, my house being put up for sale, where my mom is going to end up after the house gets sold, my brother Steven passing away, and the constant drinking when I see my mom.