Reflective Essay: Improving My Writing Process

I was pushed constantly to work harder at my writing. I studied and practiced several new techniques and methods for prewriting and organizing the essays I found so hard to create. At first, I had quite a few bad days and quite a few subpar essays. My grades would vary greatly from paper to paper. This really scared me, as I hoped to keep myself from drastically dropping in my grades. Yet, I wanted to maintain my grade point average so I had no choice but to succeed and impress around every corner. I began to pour in, even more, work and apply all of the newly learned skills from that class into my mind. I hoped that soon I would be able to find a system for writing that helped me form proper

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.

As I look back, College Composition has improved my writing techniques and skills by directing me through tons of practice with writing, readings, and examples from the textbook, in-class discussions and helped me notice my strengths and weaknesses as an English student. Some of my strengths that can be shown in my previous essays are: my ability to free-write with lots of detail, structuring an essay correctly, constructing a very well organized and detailed essay, and manage time and use it to construct a well- thoughtful essay, my thesis statements in all four of my essays were structured correctly, and also, it can take me less time to come up with a debatable topic for my essay than it did at the beginning of the semester; therefore, I have quite a bunch of weaknesses, it can take me a while to start an essay, still to this day, and I can’t begin to write an essay without completing the introduction paragraph first, every now and then the structure of my sentences can cause a problem and a hard time for the reader to understand what I’m really trying to say, and trying to get my point to come across clearly may be a challenge for me as well; also, I’ve noticed that in my previous essays I had put a few commas in the wrong places or missed some commas in a sentence, I have also misused semi-colons, sometimes I have used the wrong word or phrase in a sentence which has made my sentences really unclear and ending an essay with a conclusion paragraph can take me some time

When I stop to think about the memory’s that I have made during my first semester of college; there are both good and bad pieces or times that present themselves. Often with many things there are gray areas, and writing would fall in there for me. I fortunately understand now that I have times where I can over look many of my writing flaws. Such as sentence structure! This by far was my biggest problem in this class, and I fully understand why. Personally I have times that will type up a paragraph and never notice the mistake. That is until someone points it out to me. It’s almost like my brain knows that something is wrong with it, but for some unknown reason it won’t register when I’m revising my paper. So as a writer I have realized that I need to take advantage of people around me and get their feedback on my essay’s; because

Prior to taking this class, I would always just complete the number of drafts that my teachers would request. I would simply make the small grammatical edit and not worry too much about the argument or how my prose sounded. Tons of useless filler sentences and unnecessary words filled my papers. That said, no one is ever going to make a perfect paper because writing is not about being perfect. It is an ongoing quest for persistent development of your work and this was crucial for me to realize. I would always assume that my work did not need numerous edits or copious amounts of revision. Looking back, I am not sure if this was because I secretly feared having to correct myself so I deliberately ignored digging through all of the flaws, or that I believed my writing quality would be just sufficient to reach my desired grade. I think the more realistic answer is the former. This semester has encouraged me to break down the stigma around needing to write a perfect paper. It is not happening. Once I came to this conclusion, my reservations about truly analyzing my papers melted away slowly. This testament to the continual process that is writing, though initially tough to deal with, will surely make my writing better and more

As a writer, I have learned that there is always room for improvement. I feel like I need to improve proofreading and my approach to writing. When I am given a writing assignment, I have a hard time of knowing where to start and when I am done with my paper, I don't really read over it as a whole that much. In order to , I need to make my approach to writing and proofreading better. On the other hand, I am better at revising and organizing

I personally found that I have improved on my grammar, for example, the appropriate placement of commas, semi-colons, and reducing the run-on sentences that frequented my writing. In the role of a writer, I determined that I wasn’t as far off on my writing skills as I thought, upon entering Mrs. William’s classroom. Furthermore, I learned that I commenced to relish it. It seemed to have liberated me at times. When it comes prewriting for assignments, I generally write my views down on paper by hand. It may be old school, but it is a very effective style for me. I find the words flow more clearly in that respect. Next, I generally wait a day or so before I revisited my sample. This is the time to reread what I had written, often making the essential changes. Then I write the essay in the MLA format, print it, read it, and rectify any punctuation errors. Lastly, time permitting, I would generally wait a day or two afore I returned to my writing for two reasons. One to find supplemental mistakes and/or two to revitalize what I have already wrote. I often altered some of the verbiage to establish I was producing work worth reading. While writing, the mundane mistakes I make are generally punctuation and run on sentences.

Fortunately with the help of writing five essays, I was given more than enough attempts retrain my skills. Each essay began like every essay I’ve ever written, hampered by dry writing or typos. A somewhat recognizable creation, somewhat all over the place, but overall malleable. By the final week of the class however, I was much more comfortable with my writing.

Over the course of my studies at university, I have grown and learned more about academic writing and numerous writing styles. I believe there is so much room for me to master my writing skills to succeed and complete my degree and improve my academic writing and personal skills through more practice. However, I have become concerned with my first attempt submitting my piece of paper through the online test in the Writers’ Diet diagnostic tool and was labelled ‘flabby’ in my writing. Analysing my errors and referring to the textbook ’Communication Toolkit’ by Grellier and Goerke (2014), also submitting my piece of writing to Grammarly and paper rater I was able to measure my weakness in the area of sentence structure, punctuation and grammar.

     One of the techniques I am going to use through out college is talking to

For the college essay practice paper we peer edited, reread, sought instructor advice, and rewrote our essays until we felt that our paper was worthy of being turned in. By the end of the process we should have had a final draft which was almost completely different from our original copies. This process, in my opinion, is extremely valuable to the course as it is vital in order for incoming students to improve their writing abilities. Personally, the technique in the process which forced me to realize my mistakes on a broader level, more than any other step, was the one foot reading to find syntax errors and awkward diction which our brains skim over when simply rereading the essay. Peer editing, while still helpful, didn't seem as useful

During this semester, I have strengthened my writing by trying new writing techniques, learning about purpose, and finding new ways of combating writers block. My first essay in this class was less focused then the essays I wrote later in

Before I came to college, I felt my writing had to follow a certain pattern and be fixated around one way of thinking. What I was fortunate to learn was quite the opposite. Writing does not have to follow any certain pattern, but can rather be structured through many different possibilities. I was also told in high school that my papers either had to agree or disagree with the given topic, even if I believed otherwise. This formulated a very one-track way of thinking when it came to my papers. Now I know that I can let my mind explore new and exciting ideas. I can agree, disagree, compliment, criticize, and question the author however my heart desires, as long as I have the evidence to back myself up. Many authors in the book, Writing About Writing, explain their processes as well as the processes of others when it comes to writing. As a writer, I can draw on my own processes and relate them to the authors, as well as use their ideas and apply them to myself. Through reading, I have learned new methods of invention, planning and revising, and incubation when it comes to writing. All ways I can use to create more meaningful and creative work.

At the start of the semester I perceived of the task of writing three hours worth of journals a week rather demanding and as if no benefit could come from such a task. Despite this initial feeling however, I found just the contrary now that the semester comes to an end. The journal writings forced me to revamp my overall writing style, teaching me how to just write what comes to mind, making the process more fluent and efficient. Prior to this change I would spend a vast amount of time writing each sentence as I would critique and edit as I wrote. Not only do I find my newly discovered method of writing to be more efficient but also it leads to a more natural flow and feel in my writing. The journal writings were in my opinion very important to my advancement to become a better writer.

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.