Throughout my entire life I struggled with English. I always had trouble writing an effective well-organized essay. Throughout my education I had always received bad grades on my essays. From constantly received bad grades I slowly began to give up, and I slowly began to lose hope in English. I asked myself, would I ever improve in writing? Or will I continue failing. I signed up for English 101A and I walked into the classroom with and open-mind but extremely nervous. Because in my head I am thinking this is a college class and it is going to be way harder than high school English. You know it wasn’t that bad after all, I ended up getting better grades in English 101A, than I ever did in high school English courses. I was jumping in joy when I passed English 101A, but I immediately stopped jumping because I knew I had to take another English class and it had do with research. It was my biggest nightmare, knowing this, I was really nervous when signing up for English 102, because I was scared of not doing well or not passing. But I had no other option and I went for it. Looking back to the beginning of English 102 with professor Deadrick I learned a lot and developed many skills that I didn’t know I had or knew. Throughout English 102 I have improved my outline strategies, critical thinking, my writing skills and grammar.
Starting an essay with outline is highly important. An outline has helped me stay organized and It also helped my essay make sense. When it came to
As I look back on my English 101 experience, I have come to the conclusion that I have learned many new things that have improved my abilities as a writer. I have learned some new techniques that have improved my ways of approaching an essay. I learned all about the rhetorical appeals and how to apply them in my writing and how to look for them in a essay written by a author. I have also learned how to argue both sides of a argument, and how to look for reliable sources and to properly quote and site the author of the essay. I feel as if I have become a better writer and my improved writing skills are shown within each essay.
Throughout the English 101 course, I believe I have thoroughly improved in my writing, peer editing, and analyzing readings, along with annotating my thoughts, misunderstandings, and difficulties. I believe I have especially improved on my thesis statements, providing the basis for my essays. My thesis statements have went from being plain and uninteresting to being more detailed, clear, and concise. This enabled me to produced better written essays that are rich in detail, rhetorical statements, evidence, and experiences. I feel as if I came into this course not exactly sure how to write a college paper. I was always more focused on the length of my essays rather than the structure, vocabulary, and ideas my papers were exhibiting. My writing now flows better and presents my ideas in a clear, organized fashion.
As a new immigrant, I took the accuplacer test and went straight to 111 English level. So, English 111 course became my first college English class. It seems like a great achievement for a French speaker. Nonetheless, this performance linked to significant challenges. Even though I am a fighter and an optimist, I was frightened about my academic achievement for this semester. The problems became bigger when I took my first practice test on sentence structure (fragments and run-ons) and got a D. I was frightened and felt that I will have to drop the class. However, I decided not to give up. I started working hard and had a V+ on the next test. This positive grade energized me until now. During this semester, I have much homework and practices which allow me to identify some strengths, weaknesses, and gave me lots of skills for my English 112 class and the future.
After a grueling first quarter, I was completely miserable, with terrible grades, low self-esteem, and no end in sight. I was hanging on to the hope that there would be some epiphany moment, a moment where suddenly my writing soared, along with my grades. That change did happen, but not all at once‒ it began during the third quarter, when my teacher, Ms. Boynton, asked me to stay after class, along with five other students. She asked if we would each be interested in participating in The Atlantic and College Board Essay Contest, in which we would each submit an analysis of a famous American speech. I was truly stunned that she had chosen me over so many other students in the class, since I had felt so lost for so many weeks, but it was exactly what I needed as motivation to keep on improving my writing. As I worked closely with her on my contest submission and other class work, I came to realize how much she cared about me and wanted to help me succeed. With that being said, she never made it easy; she continually pushed me, knowing that I could always do better if I set my mind to it. Last September, I began her demanding course with the intention of purely surviving, not necessarily thriving, but that
As writers, many students write to the expectations of their professors and not to their fullest potential. Throughout English 101 I had been writing only to please my professor or to fill the basic requirement to pass English. I always felt that my writing ability was never enough for my professors throughout the previous years. They always wanted clear and concise essays, which for some reason was unreachable by me. However, starting college and taking English 101 helped me with my weaknesses and changed my technique of writing essays. My experience in English 101 taught me to write to my fullest potential and to write what I felt; rather then writing what was required.
During this semester, the realization of my past was that I have often skimmed through parts of the writing process to get the job done. Not being an avid reader often hindered my writing abilities. This class most definitely made me realize that the entire writing process is important and having peer reviews also helped significantly and certainly made a difference in the result of my work. Taking the time to read, brainstorm my thoughts, write an outline, rough draft after rough draft, reading constructive criticism of others helped in the revisions of my papers’ reaching the best possible outcome. When selecting English 102, I knew I would be challenged, but to what extent I was unsure. If like past English courses that were taken learning to write essays would be the goal. Once realizing that my work would be shared with others, providing informed information
I am currently a student at the University of Texas at San Antonio for almost a whole semester now. I came to this school straight out of high school, not knowing what I was getting myself into. During my high school years, I was good at every subject except my writing class. Coming to UTSA, I knew I was going to struggle in my writing class, but that didn’t discourage me from not trying my best in the course. Going through the English program, I realized that I have some strengths and weaknesses in the class, and it encouraged me to do better. The essays I have written for this class demonstrate that I have developed a strong thesis, organization skills, and detail; however, I still need to improve on grammar, keeping the POV, and citing.
At the beginning of the semester I entered General Studies Writing 1110, not knowing what to expect. I knew the class was solely based on writing and perfecting personal style, but I never anticipated the valuable information I would learn throughout the course of the year. The only advanced English class I have taken in high school was English Honors in eighth grade. That class gave me the base knowledge of writing, grammar and form that has helped me through my four essays in this class. Starting out, I was not sure what the standard for passing was; even though it was unclear to me what passing was, I strove for perfection. By the time the second essay came around I realized my writing was never perfect. Peer editors and family played a
Throughout this semester in English 101, I have made a significant improvement on multiple things, including how to be an exceptional writer and thinker. English has always been one of my most favored subjects to study because to me it instructs students how to be intelligent, how to become a more creative and critical thinker, and be able to develop ethical values and imagination. You can express yourself more efficiently in English than you can in any other subject. This class has truly made me a more confident writer and helped me express myself in different ways through the different types of papers I wrote. By writing different types of papers I have improved multiple areas of my writing. I have grown as a student in diverse areas such
Afterwards I addressed my essay skills, I did so by simply writing weekly and analyzing feedback from an online essay rater. However this hardship proved to provide many benefits. As I did not choose to improve rather than ignore my poor English skills, my scores in both English class and the SAT and ACT have increased. My eventually self reliance provided me with a greater sense of work ethic, responsibility, and tenacity. Now that I am rather sanguine about my essays, I feel much more confident in applying for colleges. I have always wanted to acquire a professional occupation, now that I have the application skills I found new goals. Some of my new found goals include my dream to become a biomedical
In the spring semester of 2017 I was taking an INTR 105 course called civil rights history and movies. I was overconfident because I thought the class was all about movies but I was wrong. The writing expectations in the class was to be able to compare and contrast the movies and readings. Since I had not written a paper in four months I was lost because I was never expected to write in MLA and write footnotes. That wasn't even my main concern because I knew that I struggled with grammar, tense, and sentence fluency. Mai and I have similar and different experiences because she struggled with analyze and I struggle with writing conventions. When my teacher called me up she told me to meet her in her office hours. I talked to her she immediately knew I was an ESL student and she told me I was failing behind from my classmate. She complimented on my ideas and analyses on my paper but she pointed out all the mistakes I had with grammar, tenses, and sentence fluency. She recommended me to take English 101 and her class later on because she taught English 101 can help me structure and improve my mechanics and convection in writing. I took her advice and I have been learning vocabulary, writing convection, and learning how to write different style of writing. It is a constant battle trying to learn because sometimes I cannot notice simple errors in my writing. Since my English teacher points out my mistake, I'm becoming aware of those simple
I’ve learned a lot of useful tips from this semester in ENG 201. English has never been my strong suit nor has it been my favorite class. However this college course has changed my point of view of the subject. Prior coming into college I viewed English as a useless class because I’ve already knew the basics: how to talk, read and write essays. Today I view English as an important class. It helped me in other courses that involved writing, such as World Civilization and Communications, because it allowed me to practice my skills. In my world civilization exams I had to write essays. This course helped me write an impactful essay. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that almost all of my exam scores were in the 90s, usually I do poorly in the
When I first started the class I was struggling a lot. Since English is my second language, I had many stressful moments that made me think about dropping my classes. But when I thought about my future, I just kept studying even harder, waiting for my performance to improve. As a result, I felt like every time I wrote an essay, it got easier, which tells me that I’m on the right path. In addition, this class has helped me improve my grammar, taught me an important life lesson about sticking on my goal and helped me to enhance my computer skills
I am a science major and I have always minimized English Language courses because I thought I was already very good at writing. I did not think I would ever really need to use what I would acquire from such a course. When I came to Montgomery College and I was going to take the course English 101, my expectations were that I would have no difficulty scoring good grades in the course and I would learn nothing really helpful from it. This is because in high school, I put very little effort into my English class, but I had impressive scores in writing. I began to understand that I am not as good as I thought I was at writing when I started taking english courses in college. During my previous English course, English 102, I was able to improve certain aspects of my writing which I am glad for. For instance I am confident that my essay structures are well built. But some things in writing remained a challenge for me. I am glad that I am taking an English course that would permit me to work on things I thought I was already good at like awareness in writing essays and proper use of grammar and punctuation
When I entered more regular classes in my junior year of high school, particularly my expository writing class, I did not do well. I was accustomed to doing the bare minimum, putting very little effort in, as that was what was required to pass my special education classes. However, it soon became clear that my expository class would be challenging because my teacher expected great things from her students. Once I realized this, I threw myself into the work. I would go to class after school to ask questions about the content that was covered, as well as ask my parents for feedback on my papers. I passed the class with a C, rather than my usual A, but my writing skills increased exponentially. The C grade was obviously not what I had hoped for, but it meant more to me than my A’s. There were many times that I struggled with self-doubt, wondering if I had made a mistake in my request to