We had to write about hate groups, and how they affected people around them. After hearing about this, my anxiety levels went through the roof, in middle school, we wrote no more than two paragraphs. To say that my confidence in my writing ability was low, was a bit of an understatement. I could state my ideas as good as anybody else. Putting those ideas onto paper, however, was something that has always eluded me.
Some of my strengths I improved upon were hooking my reader into my paper, having enough information, and grammar. In high school teachers didn’t pay much attention to the grammar mistakes that I was making, during the English 101 class I noticed that grammar was being emphasized more, if I didn’t fix my grammar mistakes I would do poorly on all of my papers. In the diagnostic essay my paragraphs didn’t have a good structure. The introduction of my diagnostic essay was lacking because I didn’t mention everything I was going to talk about. At the end of my conclusion I wrote, “All of the weaknesses can be toned down if I just proofread my essays and think to myself if the paper met all the goals I was aiming for”, instead of putting this at the end of my sentence I would have put a solid thesis statement instead.
Being born in a family that has a love for mathematics, I was not exposed to writing that much when I was younger, and as I grow up, I tend to stay away from anything that has to do with writing. Therefore, my skills were lacking compared to other people. Even though I did not have the worse grades in Writing class, I still did not consider my essays to be well written. However, the two writing courses in USciences, which are WR 101 and WR 102, have helped me a lot in strengthening my writing skills. Three of the papers that I wrote within this first year of college are: Literacy Narrative, Editorial, and Long Argument.
Coming to College Composition I considered myself to be a weak writer. I was not able to elaborate on my ideas, complete my sentences, and I was grammatically incorrect. Being such a poor writer made it difficult to write because I would always expect a terrible grade. The first week of class consisted of writing exercises which helped with the small things such as, grammar, punctuation, and coherent writing. After the building week I felt myself become much more encouraged to write and complete my essays to my full potential because I had a few more tips to make the paper better.
After I wrote my first draft, I had to go back to revise a lot of paragraphs and add to my ideas. Again, I feel that the in class peer review did not help very much. Most students do not take the peer reviews serious and only do the bear minimum when revising each others papers. I had my girlfriend and my mother proofread this paper for me and that helped me clear up the ideas. Also, reading the paper out loud helped me clear up my ideas and grammar.
Writing papers and fixing my errors has helped me understand my weaknesses and taught me what NOT to do. Editing my mistakes has taught me the skills to carry on in my next paper. Run on sentences, poor use of vocabulary and citations were my biggest weaknesses. I have officially mastered the skills the eliminate these errors. I no longer struggle with these basic errors.
It wasn’t destroyed by red ink or defaced by notes. A single letter would summarize my future in the class. I received Cs, Ds, and Fs, and had to rewrite almost every paper. I would make the project detailed and developed, but I didn’t follow the vague rubric. I’d make the rubric my bible, but still no change.
I have learned a lot about myself as a reader and a writer. When I first began class, I tried to read the DRP test. I had forgotten everything about college vocabulary that was on the test since I left the university in 2013. I had not read any books in a few months until teacher recommend for me to take fifteen minutes to read
When I first started in this class I did not have the best writing skills. I came from school that did not teach very good grammar and spelling. This change over the course of time in this class. When you write essays as often as we did in his class you tend to get better. My three Learning outcomes were riding in the discipline, critical thinking, individual and social responsibility.
Before this class, I perceived myself as a poor writer. When someone has never been taught the proper way to write a paper, you struggle through college SOC 300 (Dr. Stephen Adair) and hoped to get more out of SOC 478 (Dr. Fumilayo Showers) as you attend classes. I never thought about the process that it took to write any paper before these classes. However, these two professors have been very inspirational toward my writing.
During high school essays I would struggle to begin or introduce my opening paragraph. I would sit on my desk pondering without an effective plan to build my essay. As time would desperately consume thinking quickly would be the only option making me go through a “panic stage.” Basically, the uneasy feeling would make an approachable prompt confusing. My writing does not follow the writing process of prewriting, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing effectively.
I know over the past semester I have learned what major grammatical errors I should look for that I have made continuously. My research paper made me question my topic and if I should change it or not because of how difficult it was to read. I thought the paper itself was easy to write in general and if I had a different topic I
Throughout this semester, I have learned a lot from this class about my strengths and weaknesses in my writing and my preparation for in class writing. From the writing opportunities that were available in this semester, I have understand that my technical skills, like grammar are one my strengths in writing. Moreover, another strength of mine is that I am willing to revise my work, so it can be free of errors. However, I have realize that I have many weaknesses in my paragraph and essay writing, and this is mostly caused by lack of development in the ideas that I put in my writing. On the other hand, I realized that my writing has improved when I compare my recent assignment to the first assignment that I did in this class, I can clearly see
When I write I am in my own world and everything else is blocked. A writing experience I am going to talk about is a time where I had to write a personal essay on my life during my senior year. During the writing process, I struggled on how to start my intro being said that it has to be interesting. My teacher said that the intro is important because that is what keeps the reader going and if it is not interesting they will stop reading.
After a semester of FYW, I realized that my writing gets better the more I write. In FYW we had papers and writing exercises that allowed my writing to improve. A big help also was The Field Guide to Writing, which allowed me to see examples of good writing, taught me how to write correctly, and was a source of great information for writing. Coming into this class I wrote a lot of music which helped my writing as well but it was not formal writing so the transition to scholarly writing was hard because I looked over a lot of mistakes when writing papers for school. Due to FYW and the help of my class mates peer evaluations helped me overcome that issue.