Reflective Essay: My Evolution Of A Story

It is essential to understand that classes taken in grade school do not give students a full understanding of each subject. With the topic of writing, there will always be a new lesson to learn, an aspect to improve, or a differing way to explain. Author Craig Vetter states in Bonehead Writing, “This is your enemy: a perfectly empty sheet of paper. Nothing will ever happen here except what you make happen.” Each story, essay, or response comes from a writer’s experiences. With each attempt at a new piece comes an underlying story of emotions the writer is facing. Each person’s writing is unique and the ideas people have are related to their past experiences and what they believe to be familiar with when deciding which writing style to use. As a high school student, I have learned many things about writing that helped me become the improved writer I am today, but the most essential advice I have received is practice makes perfect. Although there is no actual perfect way of writing, I have discovered that each essay I write, my writing improves. It is easier to spot mistakes, find areas to improve, and ponder elevated word choice to use.

During this spring semester, I have grown in many ways as a writer, and a student. I have started to realize, and accept the flaws that I have created in my writing. In the past, I never looked into my writings and saw my problems, and if I did, I did not accept that they were problems. In my writing pieces in the past, I was very hard-headed about what I thought was correct versus what was actually correct. I have also become More familiar with different formatting options on Microsoft Word to create a more professional piece or writing. However, figuring out all the parts of writing and making them work together is the most difficult part of writing.

Writing may come naturally for some people, but for me, it does not. This class will be challenging- as it is a college course- but that does not mean that I am not going to try my best to receive an A, and meet all of the expectations this semester. Even with it not coming naturally, I do know tasks that improve my writing, like being able to analyze the purpose, audience, and rhetorical strategies used by other writers (syllabus 2). In my AP Language class I took last year the concept of being able to come up with those three things was heavily stressed; therefore, we did multiple practice worksheets and wrote essays where we would have to come up with those things. On page 3 in the guidebook, it says that we should know how to write and

When presented with the question, “who are you as a writer?”, I was speechless at first. But after thinking about it, I realized who I am as a writer has been influenced by so many different sponsors throughout my life and there was not a short, concrete answer. Brandt mentions that “literacy is sponsored by people, institutions, and circumstances that both make it possible for a person to become literate and shape the way the person actually acquires literacy.” (Brandt 43) My attitude towards writing has been influenced by teachers, both negatively and positively, by my mother, and by academic assignments over the years. My answer to the question can only be answered by a narrative of my writing life. I have convinced myself that I am a terrible writer, and when presented with a writing assignment, I get anxious instantly. I see writing as a burden and a huge obstacle that gets placed in my life. Academic writing is not fun, but something I value due to the fact that we are a grade driven society. When writing, I write to the guidelines in order to receive points for the requested criteria. The reason being, I gave up on expressing my own ideas because I had been shut down by so many teachers throughout my education. I tried to write down what came to my mind and put my own twist on things, but that was not the “right” way to write papers. In order to make both my teachers and my grades happy, I wrote what they wanted to hear, and even then I was not to the level they

From elementary school to high school, I was taught that my writing had to be structured and follow strict criteria. After I arrived in Mr. Mukherjee’s ENG 102 class, I was given the opportunity to express my creative freedom through words and graphical pictures. It can often be difficult and challenging to improve upon my own writing abilities unless motived with an idea in mind. When looking back on my time at ASU, I thought about the goals that I wanted to address for myself and the course goals that my instructor had set for the class. These goals include ones that I had accomplished to the best of my ability and ones that I need to address as well as improve.

Writing is always a struggle. You have to analyze texts, search for sources, write multiple rough drafts, check for spelling and grammar issues, cite your sources, and support your statements with facts. The list goes even longer, but this is just enough to make anybody stressed. Everyone can relate to the struggles of writing, and personally, I have fallen victim to many of these struggles. However, even though writing is very difficult, you can gain experience on how to write successfully.

Once I get past the first struggle, I am faced with finding words that make my message clear. The last struggle I face is proofreading my paper. Yes, I know I have to proofread to make sure that I understand it, a grammar check, punctuation check, but it’s such a tedious procedure that I don’t always do it. But where there are struggles, there are also strengths. After getting the motivation to begin writing, the content begins to flow and I write whatever comes to mind, it isn’t until I finish once I go back and add those transitions that make it a smooth flow. One of the writing pieces that I am so proud of being my personal statement. It’s ironic because it was the best writing experience I have had in my academic career But it was during a time in which I struggled with anxiety and stress. It was during my senior year of high school and it was just stressful to think about the future and how one piece of paper could make or break it. It was because I knew the impact of my personal statement would have on admission officers that I started the rough drafts months in advance and created what seemed to be fifty rough

English is a hard language to learn, for there are numerous elements of effective usage and writing. Many people, including me, struggle in writing because of a lack of knowledge. Since middle school, English was not a strong suit of mine. I struggled with the simplest of tasks often taking a considerably longer time to complete a task than the other students. Unmotivated teachers and a lack of interest resulted in remedial writing skills. To put it simply, I had little confidence in my writing and I dreaded taking the class because of the writing involved. In spite of my fears, I took the course and I was able to perfect and challenge my mediocre writing skills.

I started writing my first real essay in the Eighth grade, and I never knew why I was given such an awful task. I am a terrible English/Writing scholar and I never could comprehend the concept of writing. I put a lot of work and heart into my first essay, but that still didn’t get me the grade that I wanted. Needless to say I got a “D” on the essay. I was extremely disappointed in the grade I made and I wanted to reject writing all together, but that is not the kind of scholar I am, so I began my journey during my Eighth grade year to become a better writer. I had many academic goals that year, but my main goal was to excel on the English state writing test at the end of the year. The test would determine if I moved on to ninth grade English or if I would get placed in a pre-high school English program. To achieve my goals I knew that I was going to have to work hard not only on developing the papers I write, but also making sure they are grammatically correct, interesting, and that each story or essay gets the main point across as well.

This year has been a blast! There were so many things that just cried out me, and the projects were so much fun! I know I have grown as a writer by starting to have less and less edits on my paper. Making my blog helped me grow as a writer because it made me want to work harder. I wanted to work harder because I knew people would see my work. Sacred writing time has helped me grow as a writer because the time was helpful in the sense that I got some of my best ideas in just 5 minutes. Mrs. Lockwood has been a huge influence on my writing ability. Her instruction helped me grow by fixing my errors. I made many grammatical and punctual errors, that is, before I started no red ink. No red ink helped me to eliminate those errors. I usually don't

It didn’t even account for a second, my hand was already in the air before my brain could register it. I was without a doubt progressing into insanity.! I rarely ever talked for the reason that my nose was always stuck in a book. I had scarcely any friends, not on behalf of no one liking me instead it was thanks to the fact that I rarely ever talked to anyone, and I didn't care either. It was middle school and it seemed like you were necessitated to either hate the other person or be obsessed with them. I was not like that. I was an introvert, and quite proud of it too. I was so quiet that the teachers never noticed me, therefore they never called on me to answer a question. It wasn’t even mandatory for me to sit in the corner of the room, I would sit in the front row and still be glanced over.

“…As for all the seniors, I want you to challenge yourselves this year and don’t think you’re going to cruise through to graduation.”-Mrs. Smith, County High School. Although some seniors in high school refuse to take a hard schedule, I decided to take a challenging composition course my last year of high school and learned more than ever before from it. My teacher, Mr. Bacz, focused mostly on vocabulary, grammar, and how to right an essay. Each one of these subjects combined to give me a year of hard work, which eventually paid off.

My writing skills are decent, if I take the time to fully process my thoughts. When it is a timed assignment or test, my skills go right out the window, I concentrate more on answering the prompt rather than the grammar, punctuation, or structure. It’s like a jumbled mess of writing filled with lots of errors. When I’m writing my main goals are to answer the prompt, have good structure, and no grammatical or punctuation errors. These goals sometimes get in the way of me expressing myself freely; if a sentence doesn’t flow right with rest of the paragraph, I will re-examine my paragraph or paper to see if I can conjure up a sentence to finish out my paragraph before moving on to the next paragraph. Another example is if I feel like I don’t

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

I believe I have achieved most of the course learning objectives as I pass this class with a c or higher. I undertook the writing process we learned in class and it has helped me become a better writer. Before I entered my freshman year of college I didn’t know how to write. But as I undertook the writing process I was taught in class I now know how to write. First when it came to writing my assignment papers for my class I grabbed a notebook and did prewriting . I brainstormed a list of ideas for my papers. I then had a plan on everything I was going to write about. I then sit down and write my first draft. I make sure my first paragraph is a strong