Reflective Essay: The First STEP Program

Sometimes when you write an essay you feel so confident about it that you think it might bring you your fifteen minutes of fame. However, most times it just brings you fifteen minutes of disappointment when you see the grade you got. Writing is not an easy process. Just like any other skill, it requires lots of attention and lots of learning. In a way, writing is like a business. If you continue to work on it and learn new things about it, it will grow and prosper, but if you become stagnant in your learning and operations you are sure to lose everything that you’ve worked for. In that sense, Writing 101 has allowed me to continue to learn more about writing, which in turn has drastically improved it. Throughout this Writing 101 course, my

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

If there is anything that this class has taught me, it is that writing is more complex than I ever imagined. I have concluded that writing is like a cake- the good ones are creative with many layers. Coming from a small public school, I was raised on the five paragraph essay style. If you were to get a pile of my senior classes final research papers, it would be hard to tell them apart. We all wrote the same, and our style hardly changed from second grade on. Metaphorically speaking, we all created the same plain vanilla cake.

This is assignment was one of the first writing assignments I have written since graduating high school in 2005. While writing this essay I learned several things about myself and become extremely excited when I learned I had earned 8 out of 10 points after submitting this assignment.

“There’s always room for improvement” (Shannon Fritcher). In your opinion, you may be the best you can be but non-the less, there is always a place that could use improvement. In the past months, I feel like I have accomplished a great deal. As the semester comes to an end I find myself reflecting on not only how I managed to survive the first semester as a freshman in college, but also what I have learned. One of the most valuable things I have learned thus far is becoming a better writer, mainly because I didn’t think I could become a better writer. I once believed you either had what it took or you didn’t, but I was wrong. As with any skill, it takes practice to make perfect and even then, you still need to adjust some skills to make them even better! I have grown as a writer, and I am now in the process of meeting at least half of the course outcomes. My writing and learning process, now being able to compose sentences that are accurate, concise and varied in structure, and lastly the amount of learning I have left to do are all factors of my growth as a writer.

For as long as I can remember I have always struggled with writing especially essays. I am not sure if it is my lack of imagination or my lack of knowledge with writing basics but writing has definitely been a struggle for me. When I entered this class I became very nervous right away to learn that I was going to have to write in this class. Could I be successful in this class? Would I have any idea what I was doing? Although, I was nervous and had many fears, as soon as we jumped into week two things seemed to flow and my fears seemed to subside. This class was setup in a way that helped the student be successful. The key to my success was to not fear the essay but to break it apart and do it in pieces (the way the course was set up). The research paper was very beneficial in teaching me the sections of a research essay that can be carried over into other writing areas.

Writing, the bases of change around the world. People around the world use writing as a way to connect to others and to form a bond with others. I have learned what it takes to heighten my writing and create pieces of work that lays a template of my further growth. As I learned how to perform better on my reports than what I was previously able to do. Through each report I had continued to learn more about my shortcomings and had progressed to a beyond passable grade. It is because to my development that I can confidently say that I have reached all the needed criteria that is needed to pass GSW 1110.

Reflective essay writing has made me realised what thoughts and emotions I have experienced since undertaking this degree. I was under the misapprehension that finding previous study in Aged Care quite easy to complete, that this degree would be as easily achievable. I did not take into consideration what was required to work with my peers.

* Have a one on one meeting with each member and ask what they would like to do and achieve

Writing is something I always thought I had loved to do, and while that is still true, college has taught me that there are many different types of writing and I do not necessarily enjoy all of them. In high school, it was simple; You’d be told to write about a book you were reading in class or you’d be told to write about your summer trip to the Bahamas. Writing about your own experience or giving your opinion on a book is something that doesn’t take much thought, because you, for the most part, know what you want to say. Writing 101 along with other college classes, such as History, have shown me that there are so many different types of papers, such as research, argument, narrative, etc., and they each have necessary planning that goes into

My writing process isn't the typical writing process that most writers use. I normally just write what comes to mind, after reading a text. Then I go over my spelling and try to make sure it’s readable. Usually cutting corners to get my essay started.

Have you ever sat staring at a blank piece of paper or a blank document on your computer screen? I have and let me tell you it’s annoying, especially when you’re ready to get started. At that point I begin to realize that I probably should have prepared myself for this task better. Writing has and hasn’t always been my strong suit when it comes to academics. I say this has because when it comes to writing and I have taken an interest with the topic, everything just flows with ease. Then sometimes that leads to why I say it hasn’t always been my strong suit. There are times I come across an assignment and simply cannot come up with a single word to put on that blank piece of paper or computer screen. The furthest I’d get is my name and that clearly doesn’t say much. From the words of Allen Ginsberg, “To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard.” After reading this and thinking about Ginsberg’s message, I first think about what I want my voice to say in my writing and then I think about the concept of writing as a whole.

Imagine writing a ten-page essay on something you feel very strongly about, then being told you have to reduce the size of your essay to only two pages. While this may seem like an easy task, I have learned from experience that while writing is difficult, taking away from my writing is much more complicated. I have spent hours writing, my brain is tired, but I read my completed project, and am proud of what I have accomplished. Then, out of nowhere, I realize that I am only allowed two pages out of the ten I have just completed. At first, I panic, thinking, “What am I going to do? I have worked so hard on this and now I must delete most of it!” I reluctantly trudge forward, reading my essay and trying to figure out what to remove and what

I want to improve my focus on my main topic when writing to make sure my key idea is clear and to the point. Many people have the problem when writing essays or any information with sticking to their main points. They tend to trail off and lose focus on what their main topic is and they lose their audiences attention. I found out that this is my weakness in writing and I found some ways how to improve and fix it.

Tutorials necessitate that I begin work on assignments far earlier and make more progress than I normally would if I was not required to do so. I work best under pressure, so I usually do not begin assignments until immediately before they are due. I am thankful for tutorials for forcing me to change my behavior in some ways, yet I am still fundamentally the same: I don’t begin my work for tutorials until immediately beforehand. My essay writing process is just split between two instances of repeating the same habit. I find it very difficult to not write an essay all at once; stopping and starting work on it is jarring to me, and I often feel like I lose my momentum or train of thought. My writing can even alter depending on when I work on it, so I prefer to write assignments all at once, but this can be somewhat absurd when faced with longer or more elaborate assignments. I feel like the result of my procrastination is most evident in my A3, specifically page 3 and onward. The third page is a full page of text with no breaks. It is one paragraph, but it neither begins nor ends on the page. In my graded returned version, there are two suggestions for paragraph breaks. My procrastination leads me to become tangential and heedless of structure, yet it also forces me to write in sustained periods of time with my complete attention and dedication. My sustained writing in one sitting can often lead to my favorite discoveries and writing precisely because I become tangential and “heedless of structure,” focused instead on ideas--furthering my current ideas and developing new ones I would never have thought of otherwise. Because of my tangential propensity, in my A4 tutorial I had at least a page of paragraphs that were barely connected to my thesis which I ultimately scrapped. I could not include them in that specific essay because they were not relevant enough, yet they were interesting claims which I would have enjoyed exploring further. For my A5, I had the opportunity to do so, which led to what I consider my best written and most interesting claims (this is not a coincidence: they are my best written because they