English Composition 101 Reflective Essay

English Composition 101 has been a fun class that helped me build my confidence as a writer. It was my first college class, and I am glad that I decided to take the course. It was a great experience, and the class will help me immensely in my future writing. When I started the class I had zero experience writing papers. My school had never taught me how to write papers and had never required me to write one, so I was very nervous when I started the class. At the beginning, I had a lot of usage errors, and I wasn't quite sure how to even go about writing essays. I didn’t even have a clue as to what the difference between the types of papers was. The only thing I knew how to do was make a title and how to keep my thesis consistent throughout the paper. I didn’t know how to set up MLA format, write the different kinds of papers, or how to revise an essay. Throughout the class, I learned how to do all of the things

I now do prewriting activities like abstracts, Venn diagrams, peer questions and much more. The way I used to write my body paragraphs was I would just start writing, and I would not even check to see if what I was saying followed my thesis or if it made any sense whatsoever. Now I think about what I’m writing and how it connects to my thesis. I check to see if all the information fits together correctly, and I see if it makes sense. In the past, my introductions and conclusions did not always fit with the rest of the paper. I would just bull shit my way through both of them, but now I make them connect to the rest of the paper and make sure they make sense. Also in the past I never used transition word or phrases; I would just go from one idea to the next with nothing connecting them. I would also never make a new paragraph when I started on a new topic. I didn’t have to follow those simple guidelines on how to write a paper because my previous teachers never