Reflection Of Reading And Writing

Throughout my years of schooling, I have become ambivalent about reading and writing. I have struggled in school to make myself enjoy writing. I didn’t mind reading as much, as long as it was to my interest. It has differed throughout the years I have been in school. Some years I have enjoyed both, reading and writing, and other years I have not liked either. Getting myself to enjoy reading and writing has been quite the adventure.

My first experience with writing and reading was in the sixth grade. I wasn’t much of a good writer but was an excellent reader, I would read books, magazines, articles, almost anything that had words in it. Writing wasn’t my strongest subject I always had troubles in delivering the message or moral of the essay. Throughout my middle school years and beginning high school years I didn’t really do much writing or effort until my final year in high school. As I gave you a brief summary of my experience with writing and reading I will later on elaborate more on my experience with writing and reading and explain how this experience mad me a better writer.

I sat in my fourth grade classroom staring at the bookshelf when suddenly I caught a glimpse of a dark blue book with a heroic being on the front. I lifted the heavy book and began reading Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief. As soon as I started I fell into this mythical world where gods, monsters, and heroes all existed. It was a rollercoaster through my emotions. The thrill. The suspense. The surprising new book had a grasp on me, to stop reading it would be difficult. I felt attached. As soon as I started, I finished. Devastated, my chase of this feeling has never stopped, no other book has given me the same fulfillment as Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief. As a young reader I would love to find the same joy and thrill (as I did back

to be an exceptional writer; however, during the course of my writing 120 class I faced a myriad of difficulties in efforts to complete my writing assignments. Assignments such as: a memoir, rhetorical analysis, and blog were relatively new writing concepts I have not yet explored, and with the completion of each, I must say I have grown as a writer. College courses such as writing 120 are futile to the success of students who wish to grow professionally as writers in whichever field of business he or she may choose to pursue. To conclude my writing 120 course, I will begin to reflect on the tasks I have completed in efforts to become an effective writer.

Before this course started I didn’t believe I would become a better writer, but to a certain degree, I have. Since taking this course I have been able to grow and learn as a writer, editor, and creative. I have tried to improve particular aspects of my writing such as paying closer attention to my audience. I have learned writing skills and techniques from The Art of Rhetoric which I applied to my writings. In addition, an important and useful skill that I learned from this class was to start writing early. The next assignment was a working draft; it helped me write down all my thoughts and sources I had found and also determine if my focus was valid and in the right direction. After, having the working draft reviewed, the next drafts were

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.

This semester has taught me a lot in writing. From being in high school last year I have seen a whole lot of new expectations and standards that should come out your writing as well as the way you should set up essays. One of the things that scared me throughout this writing process was trying to exceed the length of an essay because I wasn’t really used to writing more than at least 4 pages. In my high school English class we never really had an essay that was as long as 5 pages. Thankfully outlines which were given in this class helped so much in what I needed to explain and what points I had to make when writing an essay.

Before I started English 101 I had a pretty great foundation on how to write essays. I knew how to set up an essay and where to place certain things to grab my readers attention. I was in AP English since my 10th grade year and I had one of the best English teachers my 12th grade year. I believe my 12th grade year was when I really grew as a writer. My teacher would write all over our essays of ways to approve everything down to the smallest thing. Then she would spend a whole class day to give us a chance to ask questions about her comments. That really helped me to know that she would explain what we did wrong not just tell us it was wrong. On all my essays I had trouble summarizing too much, not giving enough detail and writing in past and present tense all in the essay. With the help from her I was able to go on and write essays for this class keeping in mind not to summarize every little detail, give more detail and pay close attention to whether it was past or present tense.

As a future elementary school teacher, I have always thought the task of teaching kids could be a rewarding and gratifying experience. However, I recently realized that in order to obtain these rewarding experiences the teacher and students must work hard and with determination. Learning to read can be a very daunting task for a youngster. Therefore, as a teacher, it is your job to facilitate positive reading strategies from the start. Looking back at my experiences as an early reader, I can gain some insight as to what might help or hinder my future students.

In English 101 there are several aspects of writing that I did not get to explore while attending my high school. I appreciate that this class gave us freedom to write our stories without harsh guidelines that twisted our creativity. In the beginning half of the semester I wrote a narrative essay about a night in high school that I will never forget and a profile essay that included an interview about my advisor’s advice for freshman engineering students. The second half of the semester, I wrote an analysis essay about a politically incorrect advertisment and an essay exploring a current issue in the world. The broad topics, themes, and formats of each essay provide students like myself a stronger foundation in writing essays. I

In past years, writing in an academic setting has always filled me with dread. With its strict structures and limited creative freedom, essays often felt like a regurgitation of the instructor’s ideas rather than an exploration of my own. It felt like I was writing just to affirm the instructor’s own beliefs, or in a worst-case scenario, to inflate their ego. It was not until I took AP English Literature and Composition my senior year that I began to understand the purpose of writing. My teacher, Dr. Nancy Babienko, was difficult from the start, and I knew the simple “regurgitation of information” method was not going to pass. She demanded original ideas—it was refreshing. While at first, I struggled in the class, I quickly adapted and

It never occurred to me before to take some time and evaluate my reading process and my reading habits. I’ve done tons of readings throughout my whole life, including articles and abstracts for school and just some novels and fiction books for entertainment. However, I barely paid attention at any of my reading routine. All I was concentrated on were either getting the information I need from the text or, in case of a novel, enjoying the plot. Up until recently I had no idea if the way I was reading is productive or not, but after accomplishing my assignment for English class to read the texts from “On Creative Reading”, I tried to look at my reading process from a different angle.

Writing has always been something I dread. It’s weird because I love talking and telling stories, but the moment I have to write it all down on paper, I become frantic. It’s almost as if a horse race just begun in my mind, with hundreds of horses, or words, running through my mind, unable to place them in chronological order. Because I struggle to form satisfying sentence structure, it takes me hours, sometimes even days, to write one paper. It’s not that I think I’m a “bad writer,” I just get discouraged easily. Needless to say, I don’t think highly of my writing skills. When I was little I loved to both read and write. I read just about any book I could get my hands on, and my journal was my go to for my daily adventures. Although it’s

Writing is essential in the everyday human life and everyone is different when it comes down to writing. I enjoy writing personally I like writing about things I love doing such as playing soccer and gaming. When I find the right words to write to express something I feel like a genius. Writing has never been my forte. I have not written many essays in the past but I continued writing so I can learn from my mistakes and become a better writer. The hardest thing for me is to write about something that I am unfamiliar with, that causes me to procrastinate. In this paper I will be writing about my writing process with my three past essays individually. Writing has shaped me into a more intellectual individual and I would encourage anyone to always improve their writing skills.

It is my belief that through this class and the tools provided, that my growth as a writer has grown through leaps and bounds I would never have assumed possible. It is not so much the skill I refer to, although I would think skill has gone up in some levels as well, but more so the appreciation for the craft of writing itself. Intially, at the start of this class my sole goal was to further my understanding and appreciation of the writer's and books that I so love to read. Through further evaluation within the first week, a few other goals came to mind, of which were, making writing a habit, finishing what I start, stop second guess my writing skills and making effective use of detail and description. Through the use of the many articles, various reading materials, whether poems or short stories, and especially through the workshop, I feel I was able to really push myself to accomplishing these goals. I have thus far learned how important it is not to be skilled at writing per say, but to have the will to write, that poetry is as much about it's sound as it is about it's subject, just how important character development is, how the narration and point of view of a story is essential to the way the story is told, and just how much of a difference peer's critiques can make to your writing.