Student Writing Course Reflection

Ever since I can remember, I’ve struggled with writing. It just wasn’t something that came natural to me and always resulted in a very uncomfortable process. Throughout this class, I have become more comfortable with writing and its components. Though, this is only writing 101, my skill level has increased immensely. Before starting this course, writing was uncomfortable and confusing, but towards the end, my knowledge has expanded and I can more comfortably take on the majority of writing assignments.

Prior to taking First Year Writing, my main approach to writing stood on the principles of a constant formalness, persuasiveness, and providing context. Often too much context. I believe this was primarily due to most of my prior academic writing prior was solely consisted of argumentative writing, which I see as a pro and con. The good thing is that I knew how to make debatable thesis, but not with much use of all of the rhetorical appeal of pathos. Now I believe I approach writing in a much more open way, in the sense that I believe that I am much more versed in writing for academia both formally and informally.

Over the course of this semester, I have spent an ample amount of time serving as a mentor with Gonzaga’s Center for Community Engagement Youth Program, Campus Kids. In Campus Kids, we develop one-on-one relationships with mentees between the 4th-6th grades to assist them in succeeding academically, socially, and emotionally. Every Thursday afternoon at 3:10 PM, each of the Campus Kids mentors in our group meet up in the Center for Community Engagement in the basement of the Hemmingson Center. We spend this time doing icebreaker activities with the other mentors to get to know each other while we wait for our mentees to arrive in their school bus from the local Garfield Elementary in Spokane, WA. From 3:30-5:00 PM, we spend one-on-one time with our mentees where we engage in a variety of different activities such as playing educational games, working on homework together, sharing a healthy snack, talking about the activities we have done the past week, and exercising outside. In addition to meeting with my mentee every Thursday, I also ride in a carpool with 3 other mentors to Garfield Elementary every Friday from 11:00 AM-12:00 PM for a school visit where I get to sit in on my mentees’ PE class and provide support and encouragement for him as he works on developing his physical education. In this class, I help him out if he’s having difficulty understanding what his teachers are asking him to do, or I will help count the number of push-ups or sit-ups he has trying to reach

A student at Walden University will write in a scholarly manner and follow the principles and guidelines for doing so. It is of importance for a student to obtain research material that supports their writing from credible sources. With the Walden University library, a student can ensure that they are using credible sources for research material, reviewed, by peers and other scholars in the field. Programs such as grammerly provide the students of Walden University with the additional resources to check grammar and punctuation. The combination of these sources enables the student to improve their writing skills and achieve a scholarly writing style.

This course was comprised of many learning activities; each was designed to help me achieve the course learning outcomes. I have taken two college English classes in the past; however, it has been several years since my last college class. I have some experience in writing and this class definitely helped me get back into writing. I often have trouble brainstorming and capturing the subject I need to write about. This class definitely helped me overcome the challenges I faced in writing and being able to effectively express my ideas in a clear and concise manner. Not to mention, it definitely helped build my writing foundation through a step by step approach to each assignment. Therefore, this class bolstered my writing and communication skills.

The six course goals of this English 109W course are to Engage in writing as a process that includes planning, revision, and editing based on feedback from peers and instructors; Critically read and analyze academic texts; Understand, identify, and analyze the rhetorical situations of academic texts, including their contexts, audiences, purposes and personas; Understand, identify, and analyze the rhetorical situations of academic texts, which may include genre, format, evidence, citation, style and organization; Develop an awareness of and preparedness for the writing they will do through their majors through research, exploration, and or practice of the discourse community’s conventions; and Engage in formal and informal writing that analyzes and critically reflects on their major’s writing conventions and their own writing practices and choices. I perceive that I have achieved all the goals for this course through the various drafts I composed, polished papers I produced, and the supplemental work that I have selected to include enclosed within my portfolio.

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.

During this semester in English 107, I have progressed more as a writer. Before I went to University of Arizona, my writing was rigid. I wrote five-paragraph TOEFL style essay all the time in my high school life. After I attended in English 107, I was not confident about my writing skill. Throughout these three projects we have done, I become more and more confident about my writing skill than before. The Student Learning Outcomes also helped me to grow as a writer a lot. In these goals, I did well on several of them, but I still need to work on the other goals.

When it comes to writing at a graduate level becomes a major part of a student course work while completing and entering into any masters program. In this paper, I will identify four areas that I believe to be beneficial where I believe will be beneficial to my success. Throughout my many days of my undergrad studies at North Carolina A&T State University, I have written numerous papers, but when it comes to writing at a graduate level, it differs from previous styles writings. This assignment paper will identify characteristics of graduate writing and explain how writing at the graduate level differs from other forms of writing, outline the elements of effective written communication, describe plagiarism and steps to avoid it, and identify

Writing has been something that we have always had to do in school. My writing process and techniques have changed drastically since I have entered Writing 1310. When I first set foot into the classroom, I was a good writer, but I didn’t know format too well. As I went through the class, I improved on my writing skill, process, and format. In this paper, I am going to discuss my improvements in skill and my writing process, as well as the changes I have made throughout this course.

As a student, one will always want to make their due assignments top quality. Of course, we are taught by different teachers and mentors what quality a certain assignment should have, a college writing course is no different. Entering as the new class of college freshman, we discover that there is indeed a fresh or different perspective and expectation in our writing. As a result, new challenges will rise. After carefully reading and analyzing I Stand Here Writing and Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers, both written by Nancy Sommers, it has introduced a understanding of what college writing ought to exemplify. Students should be able to achieve many objectives in an essay with a different perception on

As a result of the thoroughness of this course in relation to the practice of writing about writing, I have learned a number of things that will be useful to me for the remainder of college and even beyond graduation. Through

If I look back at the very beginning of this class and compare my writing skills from back, then to the sets of skills I have developed after taking this course I can easily feel I have improved a lot as writer. I went from being a writer who is not so confident in writing skills to someone who could pre-plan his paper before starting the paper after critically analyzing the text materials. The X-men Text we studied as text material throughout the course symbolized the identity issues of our society.

- According to the student, he has started a new class and he could not find where he could change the info that he has right now on his account.

Over the course of this past semester, my ability to write has improved tremendously. Prior to undertaking this course, my expertise in writing was not as fine-tuned as it should have been. I had never previously been enrolled in a class specifically tailored to writing-- which was quite clear. Upon reading my past works, it becomes apparent that my writing style consisted of fluff, small words, and inconsistently structured sentences. These problems have, for the most part, been remedied with the coursework I have tackled in College Writing. Rather than long, drawn out papers that take an eternity to reach the primary point, my recent work is much nicer in terms of composition and grammar. I credit these improvements to the three primary