AP Language Reflective Essay

I truly enjoyed taking the English 1302 class with you, thanks for making this class easy and not stressful. During my High School year, I hated to take English because my grammar is bad, however, this class has allowed me to stress less over my grammar and focus more on my arguments. In addition, every discussion and journal have helped me learned how to think critically when analyzing poems and stories. Thanks for being an attentive professor. Which essay was your strongest?

From the start of the semester, I have found myself not meeting standards because of my difficulty being able to explain myself correctly. In one of the first formatives we were assessed on, The JFK Inaugural Speech, my use of quotations were effective, but the sentences that followed were opposite of that. While analyzing the comments made by you stating that the explanation needs to be more “specific” and “have a greater focus on analysis,” I made it my task to improve on what was keeping me from earning a better grade. When looking at my Destination Essay, the focus seems like I’m “playing with multiple ideas,” but I don’t necessarily have one perfect idea. By missing out on fixing these mistakes and seeking help from you, I continued to demonstrate this lack of explanation in multiple other essays and formatives.

Our first classwork was to write whatever comes up in our mind, which is simple. To my dismay, free writing was not as simple as it should be. After jotting down a few words, I had stopped writing, since the searching engine in my brain would not stop finding the best phrases, so that I can stuff my paragraph with impressive words. Consequently given these words I came up with, I had to connect them in sentences by making up stories.

At times when I read there are words that I don’t quite understand. When this happens I look up the word and see how I could use it. This also goes back to my writing, if I find a word in a book that I have read I can add it to my writing to improve my writing skills. When I see the effect of reading on my knowledge it makes me proud of myself because I used to get teased for always reading, but that didn’t matter to me because , in the end, I knew that reading would help me. All those people that teased me for always reading were probably envious of how much knowledge that I could acquire from just reading one book.

Attending this course made me realized I prefer writing articles than writing academic essays. I discovered my weaknesses that although I am good at writing, I often use too complex sentences by adding too many clauses, thus confusing readers. I lack knowledge on academic words, leading to improper use of vocabulary, and grammatical mistakes. My essay structure was very poor, as I failed to develop a coherent thesis, body, and conclusion. However, this course has also helped me to realize my strength as a writer.

I have realized that I have a lot to learn about writing still, and that I have some pretty strong weaknesses to work on. When I got grades back on some of my pieces I was surprised by how bad I was doing. I continued to put all my effort forth in order to prove to myself that I could do it. In my revision process I worked hard at looking at what others said about my work, and ways famous poets wrote, so I could try to find a way to make my writing better. I especially like reading Langston Hughes, and Edgar Allan Poe

The Recalling days I would binge-read some of my favorite books, I remember how much my love for writing was incomparable to my love for reading; I could spend hours reading books but when it came to writing I always felt down. Maybe my inability to write in a similar or better way than the authors of books I read, provoked thoughts of a lack of imagination and strength to write anything that could be of interest to anyone. My confidence in my writing capability was at an all-time low. Slowly but surely, I pushed myself to practice more writing, using new words, learning more about punctuation I had assumed full knowledge of, and finally, though not at the level of my favorite books, my writing proficiency had experienced a noticeable improvement and so did my confidence in my writing.

Growing up over the years I have thought of writing to be a very limited field. Limiting writing to only published books, magazines and writing my essays for school, but over the course of the last couple weeks I have learned otherwise. Having read the texts that were assigned in class and discussed them as a group, has really allowed me to see that there are more parts to writing than the actual task of writing and allowed me to form my own ideas of good writing. Although some people believe that grammar and spelling makes good writing, in actuality good writing is created through understanding the context, connecting with the audience and realizing the genre you are writing in. The first of many parts of good writing is being able to understand

Through all the years of writing I have recognized that I believed writing is all about following the rules. I have held back from truly expressing myself because I focus on following the rules too much. These rules I never thought to impact my writing have also affected other student 's writing styles. I am choosing to discuss where I believe I have learned to follow certain writing rules and rules in general while using personal experiences. I will address why instructors tend to grade and focus on such insignificant rules rather than teaching better writing skills.

My skills for writing are not where I want them to be, but if I feel like I can better respond critically to other individuals points of views. There are a countless number of things I need to work on, but I can say I am still getting better overtime. Taking the writing 102 course made me view writing as less of a burden to me. Writing now does not seem to be very difficult for me, but more fun because I can be more creative and break thing down. There’s more freedom so I can also thing about what the author is trying to say or reveal to his or her readers.

When I thought about my essay I realized I never truly revised my essays, I just cleaned it up a little then turned it in. Making sure there is minimal grammar errors is important, because it will make it easier for the readers to understand the essay, just like the sentence and thesis errors. When I would review my drafts for each essay, I started to look harder for these errors with each essay as the class progressed. I started to find more and more errors that I know I would not have found in the beginning of this class. There is an article that helped me learn to truly revise my essays, the title is, “Revision Strategies of Student Writers”, it is by Nancy Sommers.

As a "writer" I 've found my writing style to be more of a put together flourish of words and thoughts that in another 's opinion might seem like it never left the drafting stage (besides the few grammatical edits and big words to make it seem like it was written by someone smart). I went through a stage of writing in purely second person, and because of that I lost the ability to respect the need of more emotional descriptiveness. I 've gotten embarrassed to write in that context and end up passing it up for more serious tones that just don 't get my writing anywhere extraordinary. I want to gain confidence in my writing so I can go the places I want to go with it, while also learning to keep it organized and in line with my exact thoughts. My thoughts seem to provide a more well-laid out idea than my actual writing does.

I do not want that to happen in my essays. I want to push myself to write outside of the class to practice what have we learned until I know I will not and cannot forget it. Another goal is to better understand the rules of grammar, even though I am mostly able to implement them, I am still slightly unsure of when they are used. My third goal would be to clearly communicate my thoughts in the form of an essay. I have always enjoyed writing,

It has also taught me what styles I don’t like and the importance of really planning my essays to make sure I get my point across. Some of the people Alex met didn’t give her exactly what she needed but it was enough to figure things out. That’s just like the four discovering genre essays we had to do. Some of them were very challenging and I didn’t get the exact grade I wanted, but I learned from my mistakes. That’s why when it was time for my two documented essays I thought about some of the things I have learned from my writing journals and I read the peer reviews to have a better understanding on how to make my paper better.

It is difficult for me because I know I am not a great writer, but there are improvements in my writing since starting college. For example, my supervisors have given me compliments on documents and emails I have written.