My Writing Quality

This past year in English has been rewarding and self-fulfilling. I entered the year as a new and improved Poppers in writing essays. A glance at my first paper- an essay on Ender's Game- and my last one in 9th grade, the This I Believe essay, is a great example of the incredible differences in my writing which quickly improved as a freshman. However, entering sophomore year I was struck with the false belief that I was done learning about how to write and that from then on would just be about gaining more experience. How wrong I was.

Over the course of the semester, my main goal was to become a more precise writer and develop my identity as a writer. According too, the Portfolio Letter assignment sheet, becoming a better writer consists of precise planning, draft and revising. It also includes understanding a variety of academic genres by examining the basic characteristics that defines each type. In order too efficiently meet my goal of becoming a better writer, it was very important to have my work evaluated by others and myself as well. The use of rhetorical knowledge, critical thinking, reading and writing all are the important aspects in this course. All of which helped tremendously with becoming a more precise writer and developing my identity as a writer.

I am thinking about my action plan as a writer have I improved, have I met the goals I set out to achieve on my first day of class, and what have I learned in this class? I will go over my time in this class and review the various topics I mentioned above and more. Looking back over my time in this class I will critique and praise myself. How I felt about writing when I first started this class compared to how I feel now, I would have to say I am more comfortable with writing. In this essay I will review how I have improved as a writer, my greatest challenges, and how has my writing changed from how it was at the start of class to now.

“It’s what we think we know that keeps us from learning” This quote from Claude Bernard describes my writing development this year. At the beginning of this schoolyear, I thought that I was going to go into this year and be able to breeze through this class because I could write a good essay last year and analyze stories, but I was wrong. Lit Comp Honors has been a brand-new experience for me. In previous years, I have never had to work hard for a good grade. Now I have to put in extra time every night to go over vocab and stories or else I would get a bad grade. This class has taught me how to work harder and how to study better and that’s not even the writing aspect of it yet. My writing has gotten better because of

what if or what could of I’ve done to make it better would always come up my mind. Both reading and writing aren’t my cup of tea subjects, I really have trouble learning and processing how to really use certain techniques. Witnessing my transformation from the beginning when school started on August, to now ending the semester shows how much I’ve been improving. I look back at all the different forms I’ll be writing and how much advancement I’ve have come too.

During the course of English 102, I took this year of the spring semester. I have accomplished a variety of goals I once thought were impossible. I have not only grown as a writer and a student but as an individual as well. I feel that through my experience of this English course, I have achieved knowledge and self-confidence to step out into the real world. In putting together my portfolio, I could definitely see that I have made an incredible progress from the foundation of this class. My practice of grammar, words and the general structure of my papers has improved massively. Reflecting on my strengths and weaknesses as a writer, as well as things I have learned in my own writing process is a big accomplishment.

My writing process has changed tremendously over the course of this class. I feel more accomplished, confident and I feel sometimes that my ideas and thoughts just come in to my mind out of nowhere and I start writing about anything now. I pay attention to my punctuation and grammar more as I have polished them more now, not only when I write but then others write as well. I am constantly looking for errors and I highly think this is helping me a lot in my career. The comments from my instructor, the online material, my research, the online writing center and comments from other students in the discussion boards have helped me so much to improve my writing skills.

In this reflective essay I will reflect upon the course based on the assignments and projects I have accomplished this semester. Recent research (Kornblith, 2012:3) identifies that reflection is an active process and making sense of the experience through the understanding of one’s actions. As suggested by (Roberts, 2011:63) she states that the understanding of reflection have been used to develop an action stage, which can further help to improve my skills and knowledge towards my course. This is vital as it ensures that i get the most out of my learning experience and i could use them to their maximum benefit.

Writing essays and other types of posts has always been difficult for me. But, throughout this composition class, I have learned many interesting and new things about the different types of writing styles. When starting this class, I considered myself to be an average writer with run-of-the-mill vocabulary, ordinary sentence structure and typical finished products. This class has helped me greatly improve my writing skills in a variety of ways. I have learned multiple things by taking this class, such as new ways to approach writing and that there is much that I still need to learn about composition.

In previous courses, my writing skills have been mediocre or just enough to pass the class. Throughout the duration of this course, I have written a variety of papers using different techniques and skills. Previously I would write assuming that the only audience would be my instructor. This course has helped me realize that there are many steps and skills involved with writing a well-organized and easy to comprehend essay. My expectations coming into the course were high and remained high throughout the duration of the course. The essays I wrote in the class really challenged me to progress in my writing skills.

Each essay I wrote took me several time to write, several drafts which show that I have improve every time I do the drafts to write a perfect masterpiece. I learned a lot of skills and techniques this quarter, which has helped me to improve and progress my writing skills for the future. I will remember the skills, techniques, and tips that professor gave us in this English class for my higher education. For example, all the time that I went to visit professor Sapozhnikov office hours to receive help on my out-of -class essays has helped me to improve, grow, and progress in my writing skills as a writer. Some of the significant changes I have made as I was progressing and growing were to develop a strong thesis to help support my claims as I write my essays, such as facts, observations, illustration, and examples. There are other areas in my writing that I have improved on. I have improved on my grammar, verb constructions, use of verb tenses and organizational skills to make my writing flow better when reading. My overall progress in completing this ten weeks course was wonderful. Every steps and skills I learned in this English class will help me to improve on my writing skills in my other classes and will also help me in my future

As I began the journey of returning to school, one of my biggest fears, was the writing aspect in the classes. The fear of reading and writing has never been a strong quality; however, I have never able to successfully be creative in the way I learn. I understand my weaknesses and when I need to focus on my strengths. I am constantly learning new ways, skills, and tools to utilize to continue to grow as a writer.

Thank you for giving me this chance to talk about my English class, it was very excited to be a part of English 101 this quarter. We act as a family in this class by helping each other in writing, discussions stories and responding to each other. To be honest, I worked very hard this quarter and I focused more on my English class rather than other classes I had taken in SFCC. Writing is something not easy when it comes to my mind, because I am an international student and it is a differencet from my writing style and English writing style, so I should separate between them. I would not say writing English assignment is very hard for me, but I mean I make some mistakes. We wrote four paper assignments this quarter, two of them about the story we read in class, one from a story and outside material and one about English 101 class at itself which is this paper. We must submit the rough draft before the due date of the assignment, which helps us to have clarification from our instructor and from a classmate. I am always improving after each paper I wrote, because I follow up with the comment I received, edit my paper then make an appointment with my instructor before I submit my final draft. These comments make me feel confident in the next paper. Writing in something that you can improve your knowledge and the way of thinking, comparing to my papers, I will discuss how I developed revisions strategies, learned proper citation, and how pre-writing can help improve my writing.

Writing allowed me to be able to release all of my inner thoughts on to a piece of paper. Starting at a young age, I loved writing. I loved that writing allowed me to be able to put all the feelings and thoughts that were flowing through my head onto a piece of paper. Growing up, my love for writing began to fade. All this love that once appeared in my writing, gone. It disappeared. Then in seventh grade, I started to hate writing, it felt more like a task then as to express my thoughts and feelings. In eighth grade, I was afraid of people judging my paper. I started to feel that no matter how much time and effort I put in my writing will never good enough. Today I hope to be able to get my confidence back in my writing. I hope to gain reading skills and grammar

Reading and writing was one of my favorite activities to do as a kid, and it still is. Ever since I learned to read, I began to write short stories. Oh, how rude of me! I forgot to introduce myself. Hello Mr.Rase, my name’s Elena Serafimovski and I’m a writer in my junior year of high school. Writing is extremely comforting to me, I even find it therapeutic. As a young writer, I would write short stories on silly ideas like puppies or flowers because I enjoyed that. As I progressed through middle school, I picked up different styles of writing by reading books from various authors. The more styles of writing that I read, the more I wrote. I used to write about fictional characters and subjects. For example, I once wrote a small story on a girl moving in with her were-wolf stepdad. Over the years, I read more and more books which have changed my writing. I developed my own style of writing that I’ve learned to possess and I hope my ideas expand over time. I don’t recall where I got this inspiration to write because no one in my family likes writing. Actually, if I’m being honest, my family sucks at writing. I was never placed in any special writing classes, but only the standard classes for school. I joined Intermediate composition to excel in my writing for my future. From this class, I’ve broadened my vocabulary and found new ways to check my pieces that I have wrote. I could always use more work with grammar because I have always struggled with that concept. I came into