Reflective Reflection In Writing

Essays -- they are a fact of life in college, whether your major is Ballroom Dance or English Literature. This is something that can be quite intimidating to students without a lot of writing experience. However, there is a tool that provides a framework for all of that writing. The classic five paragraph essay is the foundation that everything from exam answers to Doctoral dissertations are built upon. This form can make your college career just a bit less stressful. The useful and versatile five paragraph essay format can be broken down into three easy pieces: introduction, body, and closing. A great deal of life's events start with an introduction, and those that do not probably should have! An introduction is a clear and concise way of

On February 22, 2016 author John Warner published an article on Just Visiting entitled “Kill the 5-Paragraph Essay.” Warner creatively talks about how rudimentary of a structure this type of essay holds. Writers are locked inside a cage of regulations and guidelines making them unable to write the essay as they please, but rather having to piece together regulated sentences and paragraphs because that’s what they have been told would score high on certain test questions. The article targets people of all kinds, but is more directed towards early college aged students. The purpose behind this article is to get them to expand their horizon, disregard all the regulations they have been previously taught and start to write in a much more open-minded sense.

In the 2011 article “Helping Students Meet the Challenges of Academic Writing”, educators Linda Fernsten and Mary Reda offer innovative self-reflective writing exercises that post-secondary instructors can employ to help students improve writer self-image and academic writing. The authors’ rationale for reflective and practical writing strategies were developed from direct classroom experience, and are based on four (4) assumptions. Their claim that self-reflective writing can aid student writers in overcoming conflict (due to dominant culture, upbringing, former writing experiences, gender, and other marginalizing factors) to improve writer self-identity is plausible. However, their argument that cross-curriculum academic writing can be improved through self-directed, self-reflective writing requires further investigation.

Writing is so much easier when you don’t have a ridiculous amount of guidelines you have to follow. With literary freedom, we are able to express ourselves more than if we have to follow a specific set of rules for every thing we write. This is one downfall for high school English. We have to order our papers in a specific sequence while writing about a topic that is chosen for us. This English composition class changed all of that. We were able to write about anything that related to the given type of essay, which greatly improved our ability to fully immerse ourselves into every paper. This greatly affected my writing thoughts about writing; they changed from hating to write for school to actually enjoying it because I was able to

At 11:15 on Monday, August 17, 2015, my first official college class, English 1101, began. In general, I had no idea what college classes would be like let alone how college English would be. Even though this class taught me a great deal in one semester, it took a large amount of time and effort to make the adjustment from high school. The simplistic writing style of high school was put to rest the moment the first college English class began. As a result, I learned quickly that college writing is complex and less systematic than high school writing. Five paragraph essays with three strict body paragraphs were no longer the norm for writing. Even though my professor helped guide my writing, I was no longer coddled through the whole writing

One work that influenced me the most this semester was From U.S.A. by John Dos Pasos. His work made me think about the question, How then shall I live? This has brought me to go back and think about how my life has been this far, now that I’m 21. Everyones life has bumps in the road and obstacles to over come. If they didn't life would just be perfect for everyone and thats certainly something thats not going to happen.

All through this course, I have taken in various systems for composing different sorts of essays. This class has truly enhanced my written work abilities; I can now effectively think of enough words, which was a major issue for me before this class. I couldn't have done these without the inside and out rules gave all through this class from the instructor's assignments and lecture notes.

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.

For this process reflection I am going to start with is what influences my writing and my process for writing. After that I will go a bit into what I’ve learned so far in the course and how that has add some influence on my writing as well. That being said isn’t all of our writing a reflection of ourselves? I’ll come back to that idea at the end if there’s room with this double spacing nonsense.

As a writer I’ve grown so much throughout my college experience at Rowan University through the writing arts program. I was introduced to the different genres and styles of writing within all of my courses. Specifically, my Senior Seminar Evaluating Writing course. This course introduced me to the many different genres and styles of writing. I learned quickly within this course that the genres in writing can be determined by the literary technique, the tone, the content, the voice, the vocabulary used and even how the long the reading is. Not only did I learn all of the ways to determine a genre, but I have also learned all that would not be considered a genre.

In this class, The Writer’s Mind, I have learned alot and have struggled a lot as well. Throughout this semester I have wrote some papers that I truly liked and a few I didn’t like at all. Therefore for this portfolio I added the ones I enjoyed and were proud of and excluded the ones I didn’t like, which for me, was the memoir. I personally didn’t like my memoir piece because I thought it was unorganized and didn’t stay on topic, unlike the other pieces I have chosen to include.

I have been writing since I have been in Middle School. I have realized that by college it was easier for me to write down my thoughts in order for me to remember what I have said or done. Writing out my thoughts gives me a sense of recollection, knowledge, and pacification that gets me through my day. I pictured writing to be as simple as jotting down a few sentences, but as I got farther in school I realized that there is more to it than just writing sentences. English has been my most difficult subject I have ever endured, but I have somehow been managing to make excellent grades and achieving all requirements. First in the essay, I will discuss my experiences in the English life that I’ve taken so far up until college. The second part will list my struggles in creating a thesis, a work cited, and properly citing my sources used in the papers.

Writing this piece was a process. I first scoured news sites like the New York Times and The Atlantic to find articles that piqued my interest. From there I analyzed whether or not I was a member of the discourse community of the article, and if the topic was something I wanted to work with. After choosing my article, I read it multiple times to get a strong grip on the argument and the rhetorical devices the author used. After I picked the device I wanted to focus on, I collected examples from the article and analyzed how this made the audience feel and how this elevated the author’s argument. Writing an outline like this expedited the writing process for me because my ideas were organized and I had a clear plan of how I wanted my paper to look. It was difficult editing my paper because I originally used two rhetorical devices and I had to relate logos in a different way, in order to follow the requirement of using one device. The re-wording and formatting of logos, the device I did not want to focus on, was a challenge but I think I was able to incorporate it in a way that did not hinder my development of pathos.

Analyzing one’s work is incredible important in order to explore one’s style of writing and to discover certain factors that influence it. When analyzing the work done throughout this semester, I came to the conclusion that important aspects of my writing include how my identity and style of writing changes based on my audience, the different ways I build my ethos and my use of logos, and the importance of kairos in order to persuade the reader.