Reflection About My Writing Course

When I started this class, I never thought I was a “good” writer. Ironically, after this class, I have learned how to be an organized writer and the term “good” is extremely unclear and subjective. From the short stories and questions to the individual essays, each assignment helped me practice and develop my writing skills. Overall, I think my writing has improved and the process of writing, something I often over looked, has immensely helped my writing.

Over the course of this semester, I have improved as a writer. At the beginning, I would like to think I was fairly decent, but I didn’t have much experience in anything but English and the occasional history papers. This year was difficult, as it forced me to learn new ways of writing. As I got more comfortable, I clearly improved, with my writing and content improving. Essays like the Prairie Meadows scholarship and annotated bibliography were remarkably different than what I was used to, and I benefited from writing them. The beginning of this year, I wasn’t incredibly concerned with my sentence structure or the impact of the words I used. As I learned and wrote more, my sentences got more complex and I -for the most part- stopped using

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.

Before this course, my writing exceeded above an average level, but now my writing has developed a sophisticated technique. This course pushed me to include higher comprehensive words into every piece I wrote. Continuously, I would be searching the internet for synonyms of verbs, adjectives, and nouns I wanted to include in my writings. This technique forced a maturity to emerge into my writing. As a writer, my options and understanding of diverse types of writing has improved immensely. This course allowed me to discover what forms of writing I write best, and what difficulty each type brings. My writing is strong with formal pieces, like the Prairie Meadows Scholarship Essay; pieces where I am allowed to use figurative language and make

Over the past four months, I have made great strides as a writer. The area where I have seen the most growth is in my use of the writing process. Prior to my enrollment in this course, I would sit down and write all my papers in one sitting. This class has taught me how to lay out a plan for my papers. I have learned how to effectively brainstorm/research, draft, and revise my writings before I complete them. Also I have learned to not just stop there, instead I am now going back and reflecting on my work after I complete it. This allows me to identify where I prospered and also where my downfalls may have been. With this information, I am able to apply this to future writings of mine; lessons that will stay with me forever.

This course offers numerous opportunities to improve our writing. In this class, I not only enhanced the skills I already had, but also learned new writing concepts. Before I took this class, I knew that my writing is poor, and I have always wanted to improve it; however, I did not know how and what aspects of writing to improve. So, I came into this class with the ambition to improve my writing, and I have accomplished my goal although there is still room for improvement. At this point of this course, I have learned the elements that successful writing is composed of, and I am now able to categorize the various techniques that can work together to define strong

Over the course of this semester, my confidence in writing has improved greatly. In high school, I didn’t really know how to write effectively. I wasn’t really sure what was considered to be “good writing” until I took AP* English. However, even while I was taking this “Advanced Placement” class, I was still trying to figure out how to really create “good writing”. I feel as if this had something to do with the fact that I never really had to work with the rules of grammar intensively. After taking this course, however, I now have a much better understanding of how to correctly use proper grammar. I also improved on using transitional phrases in my writing. I have implemented my understanding of proper grammar and transitional phrases in both my writing inside and outside of this class as a result.

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.

I began this course with goals to significantly improve my writing. I knew there were challenges for me to overcome, because I have not written much at all since high school, which has been more than twenty four years ago. Nonetheless, I was up for the challenge and each week I made sure to do exactly as instructed in the weekly syllabus, reading each every assignment very carefully. At first I felt overwhelmed, but as I completed the homework and discussion post assignments for the weeks prior to the major papers, the overwhelming feelings subsided and I concentrated on each task at hand.

Throughout the course of this semester, I have learned so much about writing. I used to think writing was my best skill in terms of school, but after taking this course, I realized I have a lot to learn still. In high school English was always my highest grade because of my writing, my writing in my SAT scores was always the highest, and last semester in ENGL 1301, I got a high A in the course. But this course has challenged me as a writer to think outside of the box and be more academically smarter in terms of writing. The journals have helped me write about things that we like more than the other assignments because it gives us more freedom and flexibility about what we can write about. These journals are being used as a tool as practice

I believe I have grown a lot since the beginning of this course. My writing was severely lacking grammar and punctuation. I didn’t use any punctuation other than periods and very few commas spersed throughout my papers. My papers still need help in that area, but I have improved. I now know where they need to go and when it’s appropriate to use them. My papers aren’t exactly flawless but they are better than before. I would write how I speak at times and I knew it wasn’t right, but I would still do it because it allowed my papers to flow better in my mind. I read my papers out loud to help avoid my problem with writing how I speak. I’ve learned my writing style in this course, or lack thereof. I found a program that would benefit me now and

I feel that I have improved my writing abilities during the course of this class. I am looking forward to applying the new found skills to future classes. One valuable tip I learned was to always read a paper out loud before turning it in. This has helped me to catch many errors. I had never thought of doing this prior to this class. It is an excellent tip because when you’re reading to yourself in your head you often miss errors. Once you read them out loud you can hear how things sound and will notice if something does not sound right. Putting the assignment away and coming back to it was also a great tip. I have found when I come back to an assignment I will notice a wrong word or punctuation that I hadn’t seen before. It also gives you a chance to really think on the topic and come up with more detail.

During this second semester, I learned about many techniques that enhanced my writing. I cannot believe that my first year of college is over because it seems like yesterday I attended my first class. I will use this techniques throughout the rest of my life to make my paper stronger and more professional. As I continue to learn I will add techniques I learn in the future to make my writing even stronger. I believe my writing is strong, but can

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.

Over the course of this past semester, my ability to write has improved tremendously. Prior to undertaking this course, my expertise in writing was not as fine-tuned as it should have been. I had never previously been enrolled in a class specifically tailored to writing-- which was quite clear. Upon reading my past works, it becomes apparent that my writing style consisted of fluff, small words, and inconsistently structured sentences. These problems have, for the most part, been remedied with the coursework I have tackled in College Writing. Rather than long, drawn out papers that take an eternity to reach the primary point, my recent work is much nicer in terms of composition and grammar. I credit these improvements to the three primary