What Makes an Effective Writer and Learner

At the start of this course, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I had a goal for myself to improve and learn skills that would make writing less daunting for me. I have learned so many things about my writing that I didn’t think much about before. Another goal I had was to break the cookie-cutter mold that was set upon me throughout high school. During the process of revision, I discovered many things about myself as a writer and techniques that have been effective for me in the writing process.

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.

Throughout the seven weeks that I have taken this writing composition course, I have developed skills to help me improve my own writing. Using the writing process is one of the main focuses in the course. The writing process helps writers develop and revise their essay as they work their way up to creating the final draft that can be presented. Although there are many areas in my own writing where I can get better, I have found that my writing has improved in many ways while practicing using the writing process.

Students are still usually mentally asleep in the morning and it affects their learning performance. “ Society’s provision for learning is school, but the brain is sleep”(Knapton pg.2).

The overall course of English 102 with Professor Lyn has impacted my writing and me as an individual. Not only did the course help me improve my writing, but it helped me think of the ideas and norms that we ascribe to in the world as more complex. This portfolio shows how some of the learning objectives of English 102 reflects my growth as a writer and thinker. The papers that are included in this portfolio demonstrate my mastery of the learning objectives of this course. There are first drafts to show where I began in my writing process and final drafts to demonstrate my understanding of what was wrong in my first submissions. My ability to edit and recognize errors in my paper shows my improvement of writing. The different types of writing and audiences the papers are intended for impacted my approach of writing these papers.

This course has helped me enhance my writing abilities and display the rhetorical purpose of my essays. Coming from Lebanon, this course has definitely been a challenge, yet I believe I have learned a great deal this semester. This course encouraged me to engage in ideas of my own that I discovered throughout my writings. The articles I have read challenged me intellectually allowing me to view a writer’s perspective on a specific topic. The engagement with my classmates and the feedback given during this class gave me the opportunity to extend my thinking abilities. The two main techniques that I have learned this semester is; identifying the purpose of my writing, integrating evidence from my articles and supporting my statements.

In my ePortfolio, I have gathered a series of my writings that I have completed over the course of this semester. Overall in this entire course I have learned a great deal of material that has pushed me to become a better writer. From my past courses, I have noticed that I am not the strongest writer but I do try my best. With Professor Knox’s tough grading system, he has given me drive to bshow my potiential as a writer. I feel as if my knowledge has increased a significant amount on the following topics/concepts and I support each claim with the correlating artifacts 1) Writing process Artifact 1-Writing Log 3, (2) Discourse Community-Artifact 2 Assignment 2 Partner Review, (3) Rhetoric Artifact 3- Assignment 1, (4) Genre Artifact 4- Reading Notes Week 10; and (5) Critical Thinking, Reading, and Research—Artifact 5--Assignment 5. Every assignment has shaped me into a more developed writer and has prepared me more for ENG 280.

When I entered your classroom on the first day of school this year, I was confident that what I had learned in previous years was sufficient enough to call myself an experienced and competent writer. However, I discovered throughout the semester that this confidence hindered my ability to improve in the beginning. The first few days of analyzing essays and literary works was something I had never experienced before, opening up my eyes to a side of literature and the English language that I previously did not pay any attention to. After we finished writing our very first in-class essay, I was extremely surprised to see that the score I earned was a 6. But when I look back on that very first essay, I am even more surprised to see what I could improve using the knowledge and strategies I learned in AP Junior English.

I like to consider myself a writer and often look for ways to improve upon my craft. I found Crafting an Effective Writer and was pleased with the long-term effects completing this course will have on my life. These effects will cross over all aspects of my life: personally, academically, and professionally as I view them as all being intertwined. In this class, I learned to see that the writing process does not have to be difficult. The guidelines that I have incorporated will ensure that my writing stays on track. My writing will be more focused and better organized. Following my outline will take the guesswork out of what to do next in order to complete my project. Another

This Eng1513 portfolio is about my reflections on this course. In the reflection, it highlights how I accomplished my goals in improving the quality of reading, being a critical thinker, grammar and improve language proficiency. Critical thinking is the ability to think clearly and rationally, understanding the logical connection. A critical thinker can understand links between ideas, approach and solve problems consistently, reflects on self, solve arguments and produce ideas. Academic writing style presents information that displays a clear understanding of a subject. It is based on pursuing readers to accept the writer's opinion, telling a story, explain and describe something. This portfolio will showcase my expectations of the course,

A student’s education is like a minefield. It requires careful attention and mindful thinking to navigate through to be successful. From the start to the end of a school day, it is important that a student is fully awake and is able to pay attention in all of his or her classes. Similarly, navigating through minefield requires attention and precise thinking, or failure can occur. Neither of these activities should occur early in the morning when students brains are tired and lack sleep. This could lead to a lack of knowledge in morning classes or even all classes as students brains would stay tired throughout the day, leading to failure.

Overall taking this course has greatly improved the way I address writing. I learned so much about the importance of language and the inclusion of the proper building blocks when crafting a piece of writing. For instance, our exploration of the use of figurative language in the beginning of the course continued to be very helpful to my writing all throughout the semester. A second example would be the importance of establishing proper objective and obstacles when writing. While we made use of “objective” and “obstacles” in our work with fiction and character development, I was inspired by our exercise to think about the day in terms of what our day to day objectives and obstacles were. As a result I identified a larger connection with both

I believe it is important for any student who wants to do their best in a class to take a moment to evaluate their own work to determine the rate their writing is progressing and how they can continue to advance their writing. When I looked through my own work I asked myself “what have I learned this semester?” and “what do I still need to learn in order to improve my writing?”. Answering both these questions will help me with my last step of my self-evaluation, developing a plan to learn new skills.

My English 908 class almost comes to a close, and now it’s time for me to think “what I have learned in this class?” Reflecting on the past two months, I notice that this class has offered me the ability to aware of my personal strengths as well as weaknesses and also provided me methods to strengthen them. In addition, because of the huge amount of journal entries that we need to write week after week, both of my attitude toward writing and my point of view of studying and daily life aspects have matured. Now, I enjoy writing compositions and expect a higher quality of my work. Moreover, the quizzes helped me understand how to use comma, articles, and transitions properly so that I can transform my mediocre work into a well-composed essay. Therefore, knowing how to become a more effective writer is the most important benefits of attending this class.

The written coursework this semester has provided ample opportunity to identify problems in my writing and to improve not only my ability to analyze works of literature, but also in expressing this analysis and other thoughts in written form. I think there is a clear progression apparent in the three essays discussed below, demonstrating the refining of my writing abilities and my analytical process that occurred during this course. By identifying specific successes as well as ongoing issues in these three essays, it can be seen that I have identified and achieved some clear goals in my academic progress.