Reflection Paper On Graduate-Level Writing

Upon entering Columbia College, writing was one of my weaker areas. It was very important that I gained the necessary knowledge and confidence to become a better writer. I didn’t know how to express myself and felt as though my writing was not my interest. As a result of taking English 101, I have gained a better understanding on how to properly research and build a satisfactory paper. Every paper that was assigned seemed like a struggle to complete. Before entering this class, I did not know the meaning of a thesis or why it was important, however, I obtained this skill quickly. I noticed that every paper has an argument and the thesis helps clarify the rebuttal. Now, I have a new outlook on writing. It’s a way to express my thoughts and allow others to see things through my eyes. There is no doubt that I still have a long way to go, but I know if I continue to write, I will get better. Just as I developed more skills in class, the various papers assigned helped to better structure the writer in me. In addition, the subject areas were not only interesting, but very informative and made it much easier to write about my experiences.

This essay will be a self-evaluation of my writing style, and the improvements I have made over the past three months. Before I took this class I had not written a paper since the last time I was in college. That was around 2004, my major was computer software. For that major there isn’t a whole lot of writing involved. This was more of a refresher class than anything. To be honest I was a little intimidated, for the simple reason I had not written anything like this since high school. I will discuss how I discovered my writing process. My development as a writer throughout this semester, and finally I will evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of my essays.

Throughout my semester in English 131, I have gained many improvements to both my writing skills and my writing process. One such improvement was making me think critically on my essays in both this class and another class where we had to write essays. On all of my later self-reviews, I constantly gave way below what I was eventually given, and that helped me so much, by changing my essays so much more than what I would have done originally. That is evident by how my grade has steadily gone up on each of my papers. The memoir that I first wrote was my first ever graded that was really beneficial to my grade, and I got a 44 out of 50. The next paper that I wrote was a profile, and I got the same grade on that as my memoir. The first improvement that I had was on the review essay, and that was only by one point above the other papers that I wrote. Lastly, the best improvement that I have had was with my final paper, a proposal essay. On that essay, I got a 49 out of 50, a major improvement to my other pieces of writing.

While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.

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

As the semester approaches a conclusion, I have discovered for myself that I happen to exhibit not simply on how I have endured this semester, but then again also what I have gained in knowledge of. In the past four months, I would consider that I obtain an accomplishment of achievement in improving my writing techniques. The most important principle that I have discovered so far ensues on how to become an improved writer. With each writing assignment, I learned additional methods and skills, which tweaked my capabilities to develop my thoughts in detail on paper, to write clearly, and to organize my essays efficiently. In previous years, I would frequently catch myself irritated believing I had terrible writer’s block standing in my path of writing an organized essay. This created a feeling as if I could not distinguish how to write properly and the reasoning behind my hatred for writing. During high school, I learned the Modern Language Association (MLA) formats for bibliographies and parenthetical citations, consequently at the beginning of the fall semester, I knew only this format. I was able to learned the correct format for the American Psychological Association (APA) style when doing each assignment at hand.

In this journal, written by Elizabeth Wardle, she discusses the bridge between high school level writing and collegiate writing. Although some students come to college well prepared in their writing ability, others fall short of the expectation and often focus too much on the structural nature of writing, rather than the writing itself. Wardle elaborates on the ideas that high school educators typically desire for the students to focus on the information in said paper, in lieu of discovering a wider variety of techniques and genres. A high school student writes a paper to put his/her thoughts onto one cohesive document. It is a rarity to find one student who writes for the art of writing. Wardle does an excellent job

Prior to entering class, I deemed myself a competent writer. However, I quickly discovered that my writing involved mediocre writing precepts. In contrast to the principles of scholarly discourse, my writing held the tenets of conversational writing and failed to meet academic standards. Furthermore, much of my poor writing was akin to a deep-rooted habit that I found humbling to admit and challenging to correct. Passive voice, unneeded words, long sentences, were a few of the obstacles that impeded my journey to effective writing. However, using peer reviews and an editing checklist I slowly began improving my skills as a competent writer. I also found that reading concerning writing provided supplementary methods to improve my skills as a scholarly writer. Implementing these innovative techniques, I slowly began to

As a freshman at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI, I took the writing class WTNG 102 Section 31, taught by Professor Ramey. All undergraduate students must receive at least a 70 as a final grade in the class prior to being enrolled in Critical Writing, WTNG 200 or 220. Entering college, I was most worried about taking Expository Writing because writing has never been one of my strengths. I have always struggled with writing transitions, and have made endless grammatical mistakes, including comma splices and tense changes. I hoped that Expository Writing would help me with these writing mistakes. Another thing that I hoped that WTNG 102 would do for my writing is that it would… Over the semester, I wrote a total of four papers with three different learning objectives and specific understandings. The first paper, “The Real Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet” shows my understanding of rhetorical knowledge. The second paper, “What is a Discourse Community?” shows my understanding of discourse community knowledge. The third paper, “Genre Analysis” shows my understanding of genre knowledge. Through these three papers, I have achieved the learning outcomes in rhetorical knowledge, discourse community knowledge, and genre knowledge.

Students and researchers use the APA style and formatting in academic writing, as defined by the American Psychological Association. These guidelines bring uniformity and standardization to such scholarly writings as student essays, research papers, and journal articles. By setting the foundation for

Having academic success is what a person strives for as they first pursue a collegiate education especially at a graduate level. But there are instances when the journey is first pursued that many students may feel intimidated by responsibilities, preparedness, and the confinement of certain codes and rules set up by how an instructor may grade and the format a student writes in, like American Psychological Association (APA) style. Knowing that the main goal overall is to graduate and a main component of academic success is writing. Being prepared and responsible may be challenging but can produce a greater reward

I’m not going to lie to everyone, writing is not my favorite thing to do in life. In fact, I’m looking forward to my last class for my bachelor’s degree and my last essay or paper to complete said bachelor’s degree. I cannot pinpoint whether my discord with writing is attributed to a lack of ideas flowing in my head, or the inability to translate my ideas to paper. With that being said, I started this class with a basic knowledge of the APA writing style and I’d like to say I had an intermediate level of understanding of grammar. After these past eight weeks of Writing 101, I now can easily setup and build an efficient APA essay and I’ve learned how to conform to the APA writing style’s reference page.

A central part of Rhetoric and Composition classes is being able to understand an apply rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking and reading, the process of creating a paper, and being able to understand source formatting. Throughout this course, I’ve written new types of papers, expanded on my analytical abilities, and have gained valuable information on how to improve on papers that I’ve written in the past. My argumentation and organization have improved greatly by in-class workshops and critical, but well deserved, teacher comments. These skills are essential in writing I’ve learned and improved on many of the goals listed in the syllabus this semester, which will be necessary for my future schooling.

Strong writing skills are vital component used by post-secondary students, considering a large proportion of third and fourth year courses assign term papers to assess and grade a student. Upon graduating high school, I believed my writing skills were above average and that I would not benefit from the FAW courses required for my undergraduate degree. The FAW I orientation furthered this belief with a very simple power-point presentation, propagating the assumption that the FAW I and FAW I courses required for my undergraduate degree would be a simple way to increase my academic average. However, it became blatantly aware that this assumption was incorrect. In fact, the FAW courses helped me distinguish valid academic sources, learn the importance

As I come to the end of my first master’s course, it certainly does come with a price of perfection, and perfection I have not found yet. I feel overwhelmed with words and the usage of APA style. My professor Dr. Kris Lichtanski says that scholarly writing is a must when one enters the Psychology field. I have finally understood what scholarly writing is truly about. Every time I hear the words “scholarly writing”, I think of Aristotle and Socrates for some reason, These two famous men from the beginning of antiquity, have impacted our souls and minds with such great wisdom, such as education and medical teachings that one can only imagine and