Reflection On Writing

Starting my ENG101 class, I felt like it was the basics of learning grammar and English material from high school. However, I quickly learned that I needed to brush-up on some of my writing skills. I acquired skills of the past, as well as some new ones. Writing may still be slightly confusing to me when using correct punctuation, run-on sentences, and organizing my thoughts. Learning to use an outline, create a topic to answer questions, and brainstorming has taught me to become a better writer.

I have been practicing on how to improve my writing over the past few weeks, which has taught me a great deal about writing. My teacher would like me to evaluate and explain my strengths and weaknesses in my own writing. This evaluation is in between my two essays. One on my own and another with my teacher's help. I have strengths and weakness in my introduction, body paragraphs ,and my conclusion.

When I look back at my writing before having any college experience, I can see that I had a lot to work on. I can say that I was never really a big fan of writing anything much less essays. Even when I was younger, I just did not have a great big interest in writing. This was because I felt that I could not elaborate as well as others. I was not use to having to write anything really, but I now feel that I have a better grasp on the steps that I need to take to get my writing on the level that it needs to be.

We are already midway through the first quarter of my last year as a high school student. I find it hard to completely grasp how quickly this year is passing and yet I feel like we've already accomplished so much.

Over the past semester my writing has improved in three specific areas: extending the length of my writing so that it is more than just 300 words per piece of writing. Clarifying and giving my writing more detail so that it is easier to understand and follow. And finally by improving my spelling and punctuation throughout my piece instead of just spell checking the first few paragraphs.

As a student entering the 10th grade my essay writing abilities were questionable at best. However over the course of my sophomore year I acquired new skills and techniques to construct and write essays. In some cases this class broadened my abilities already in place and in others it constructed new abilities to help strengthen others. All in all I am a better writer than when I entered my sophomore year. Despite all the positive changes to my writing style that have occurred over the past year some parts of my writing style require more effort to come to par with other parts of my writing style. As a writer over the past year I have reinforced my arguments well, and learned to develop a thesis better than I had, however I require more work

Writing is an important form of communication. It is a personal process that portrays your thoughts and views to someone else. It is not only an important skill to have for school work and certain professions, but daily messages such as emails, texts, and tweets as well. It can have a big impact on how you come across to certain people. Because of this, it is very important for me to practice writing. I believe that this course has improved my writing, which will help me in many ways in the future.

Olympian, Kim Collins said, “Strive for continuous improvement, instead of perfection.” This quote can also apply to students in school in many different ways. Students always want the best project or writing grade that they can possibly get. While that is a worthy goal it is not realistic because students are not perfect and they are still learning, and developing important skills. In my personal essays throughout the year I did strive for perfection, but I learned that I could not do it. I had to make slight improvements to better my writing for the next essay.

Looking back in this class, I have realized just how much my writing has improved since the beginning

After reading over my summer assignment essay and analyzing the comments and feedback of my writing I feel that I have a lot of work to do to improve my writing as a whole. I feel I had the ideas down on what I wanted to say on my summer essay. It was just difficult expressing them in a way that was compelling enough to the reader. The topics for the essay were not challenging to me because I felt that I wrote a lot about the one I chose on alienation. Throughout my reflection I will discussed the weaknesses and strengths in my writing as well as talk about ways I feel I could improve my writing.

Throughout this year you have seen me develop as both a writer and as a person. This year for LA has definitely been a challenging one for me, as I learnt how to manage my time effectively, develop my writing and properly edit my writing pieces.

While I was starting the process of writing the connection narrative I felt that my writing was going in the right direction. When I finished my rough draft, I knew more work was required in order for me to get a high grade which I would eventually work on. Going into the peer review I felt nervous because I received low scores on my previous papers by my peers. When I got back both of my reviewed papers I was surprised, to say the least. I thought I understood the purpose of the prompt better. I lacked details on how the issue connected to me which discouraged me to keep writing. I felt embarrassed that my peers had reviewed my work. It was hard to accept that I don’t always have strong writing. I do appreciate the feedback they gave me which allowed me to rewrite everything in a way that would address the prompt and would be better understood.

I have witnessed myself intellectually grow since September of junior year, 2016. Coming into junior year, it was challenging for me to center my thoughts and have a developed focus in my essays. Furthermore, it was challenging to get my voice to the reader and slightly hard to understand the difference between critical analysis, synthesis, and summary. Through the progression of this year, I have slightly improved my critical analysis and synthesis skills; I have learned to continually ask myself “why” and “how” whenever I made a claim and combining sources together to develop a coherent well-developed essay. Starting out with the “The Great Influenza” in class essay, I was able to practice critical thinking

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.

Since beginning to write papers in English class, I have had countless successes and failures. While many of my English classes have taught me how to improve my writing, I have not learned very much in others. My most recent English class was last year, my sophomore year. My class was particularly undersized; therefore, it gave each student the opportunity to have additional individual attention. Throughout the class I experienced high points, weaknesses, and even difficulties that I never overcame. Overall, my writing skills improved, but only marginally.