Personal Writing : Personal Reflection

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.

My literacy narrative titled, “Affinity for Reading”, helped me analyze and assess how I really felt about writing. Reading through my literacy narrative, I see how far I have grown in my grammar and mechanics and formatting. I remember after I turned the assignment in that I forgot to change the font to Times New Roman. I thought I was going to fail based on that formatting error. While I was fleshing out my ideas for the assignment, I sat down at Starbucks and just wrote any and all memories of reading and writing that I had. It was not incredibly efficient, however, I learned how to create more structured outlines as the course went on. In addition, I also learned to triple check basic formatting for each essay to ensure that each essay was as accurate as possible.

Everyone on the planet has a goal set in life, but only a handful attempt to improve to obtain their goal by studying the subject their goal is in. In my English class, English 101 this quarter I was astonished by how much I had progressed as a writer sharpening my writing skills and also learned a lot about writing that I hadn’t learned before. In my writing portfolio for this quarter I had to write an autobiography essay, a research essay, and this reflection essay to develop my writing skills better. The writing assignments were fun to do because it challenged me to work on essays of different styles that were new to me. The essay assignments helped me grow as a better writer that gave me the self-confidence and skills to take on the world on my own.

Throughout the course of English composition 101 I had participated and worked on many different assignments that lead to better understanding and enhance of skills I had already learned in while in high school as well as the learning of new techniques and process in which to imbedded into my writing to make it better. Some of the assignments and in-class activities that lead to this included the several essays I wrote, presentations, actively-reading assignments, and in-class lectures. These assignments and in-class activities led me to better understand how to compare essays, use and develop a writing process that work efficiently for myself, better organize essays, learning to use grammar and punctuation better, identify creatable sources to use in papers, to read critically through another person work, and citing sources using MLA format. Although I had already learned the basics of many of these learning objectives throughout my high school education this course helped better enhance these skills and better prefect my writing for the future courses and careers.

As a writer, I find myself getting lost. Typically, when I go to start writing I hit a brick wall. It’s as if all my thoughts suddenly escape my mind and I draw a blank. It takes me forever to conjure up some form of a thesis and then takes even longer to figure out what I should write to support it in a way that makes sense. Then, attempting to find a way to organize my ideas and put them together in cohesive paragraphs seems like an impossible task in the moment. It is not uncommon for me to get flustered and just throw something down on the paper because I get anxious seeing how much work is left to do. If I end up going back to read it over prior to submission,

At the start of this course, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had a goal for myself to improve and learn skills that would make writing less daunting for me. I have learned so many things about my writing that I didn’t think much about before. Another goal I had was to break the cookie-cutter mold that was set upon me throughout high school. During the process of revision, I discovered many things about myself as a writer and techniques that have been effective for me in the writing process.

In my English 1010 class, I have learned to do a number of things through writing essays. I have written a Literacy Narrative, a Discourse Community Analysis, and a Writing Research essay. Firstly, I have learned to identify how an author’s purpose, audience, genre, and context determine effective writing. The purpose of the literacy narrative was to help me understand myself better as a writer (Jones 1). My teacher was the intended audience of the narrative. The genre of the narrative was non-fiction because it was about my experience as a writer. The context of writing made my writing more interesting and more effective. All those things make effective writing because you have to know what you need to write about and who is receiving your writing. I displayed these skills by going into detail of my experiences with reading and writing through my life. In the narrative I shared how fun and exciting it was when my second grade class got the opportunity to write a book, A Book of Future Astronauts (Writing is Good).

The Personal Narrative essay was an assignment that I not only enjoyed but also learned from. The first person perspective was an aspect that I found easy to write with but the pathos aspect was something that I struggled with a little more. The emotional nature of this topic

Writing 101 has been a tremendous learning experience for me. It is not my strongest area, so it is my primary reason for taking the class. I took this Writing 101 class to improve my writing skills. In college courses, I have to do a tremendous amount of writing. Writing is also not my favorite thing to do, because it takes time, thought and research. The first week of class, we had to write the first assignment draft. I thought this class will be hard for me and difficult to keep up with the assignments. I disagree with my initial thought. The class definitely challenged me, but I learned so much. My expectation was to improve my writing skills. I would say I met that expectation. However, I feel that I need to continue to learn and perfect my writing to become even more proficient. I learned how to develop strong thesis statements, to conduct online library searches. I started WRTG 101 with a basic knowledge of the writing skills; now I know how to accurately use punctuations, I know how to develop unified, consistent and well-supported paragraphs, and I know my weaknesses in my writing.

Assignment two was a personal narrative and I choose to write about the time I found out my parents were getting a divorce. I found out this information spring junior year. This assignment was very difficult for me to write, I struggled with writing my feelings on the paper. Throughout my writing career I have never been good at writing personal essays. Although, I struggled with writing my ideas on paper. I succeeded in giving sensory details and being able to create good dialogue between characters .While I feel my personal narrative made strong use of dialogue, sensory detail, and the overall idea. An essay can always be revised and edited. I needed to work on making sure my tenses are the same throughout, adding descriptions of characters,

In my ePortfolio, I have gathered a series of my writings that I have completed over the course of this semester. Overall in this entire course I have learned a great deal of material that has pushed me to become a better writer. From my past courses, I have noticed that I am not the strongest writer but I do try my best. With Professor Knox’s tough grading system, he has given me drive to bshow my potiential as a writer. I feel as if my knowledge has increased a significant amount on the following topics/concepts and I support each claim with the correlating artifacts 1) Writing process Artifact 1-Writing Log 3, (2) Discourse Community-Artifact 2 Assignment 2 Partner Review, (3) Rhetoric Artifact 3- Assignment 1, (4) Genre Artifact 4- Reading Notes Week 10; and (5) Critical Thinking, Reading, and Research—Artifact 5--Assignment 5. Every assignment has shaped me into a more developed writer and has prepared me more for ENG 280.

In front of me, my laptop screen cast a pallid, taunting glow over my face. On the table, caffeinated-chocolate wrappers and hastily drawn flowcharts lay nestled among a jungle of power cords. Even my loose ‘E’ key was prompting me to give up for the night, jiggling weakly as I typed. I turned to the three other members of my team. “It would be a miracle if we successfully finish this in time.” The words echoed amidst muffled snoring coming from another team nearby.

Writing is way that we can express ourselves, it is a way to interface ideas and thoughts and to prove a point. Throughout my writing experience or process I have struggled with writing especially using details or really expressing myself my work. In this course Facts & Fiction: Portraits in World Art I expect to gain more knowledge on how to write a perfect essay, story, letter, and assignment. I expect to learn new genres and rhetorical situations. I also think my writing will improve academically and I will develop my skills in writing. Also taking my writing to a different point of view, level, and writing something different rather than the usual. I look forward to getting feedback from my peers and learning their thoughts on my writing and how they can help me improve.

My writing skills are decent, if I take the time to fully process my thoughts. When it is a timed assignment or test, my skills go right out the window, I concentrate more on answering the prompt rather than the grammar, punctuation, or structure. It’s like a jumbled mess of writing filled with lots of errors. When I’m writing my main goals are to answer the prompt, have good structure, and no grammatical or punctuation errors. These goals sometimes get in the way of me expressing myself freely; if a sentence doesn’t flow right with rest of the paragraph, I will re-examine my paragraph or paper to see if I can conjure up a sentence to finish out my paragraph before moving on to the next paragraph. Another example is if I feel like I don’t

Click-cli-cli- click, the rapid sounds coming from Mark’s keyboard were frantic at best. He was inside his small cubicle, stacked by all of the others in the office building. His hand shakingly reach for his cup of coffee, and brought it to his mouth, cold. He didn’t care, he didn’t have time to get a new one.