Reflective Essay: What I Learned In My Writing

ENG-122 Reflective Essay 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.

It is not because the contents of the journals are easier since I can write both reading responses and unscripted entries faster than typing into my laptop. The reason may be that I do not think much about the sentence structure before I write down something on paper. Also, I try to write really fast in order to put my thoughts down before I forget about them. The SAGES writing crew is very helpful that the tutors point out my grammar mistakes and train me to find my own mistakes. At first, they do not just look through my paper and help me edit it.

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.

Based on research conducted by many scientists, both handwriting and typing have their advantages and drawbacks but what exactly are they for taking notes? According to Cindi May from Scientific American, handwriting is the best way to go. Her evidence for this is that a recent test performed by scientists named Pam Mueller and Oppenheimer shows that handwriting is better for comprehending or learning the material. They say that handwriting requires different types of cognitive processing that require you to hear and concentrate on the information that teachers and professors give you, just like a lecture. On the other hand, handwriting is slow and cumbersome which is why many schools are not using it as much as back then since we are going into an age of new technologies.

The way I prepared myself for this book was on every page I had at least about three sticky notes stating the important facts and at the end of the chapter I had a one sentence summary stating the main idea opic of that chapter. This method I have found out has helped me the most it helps me remember certain things better due to my short-term memory loss. For my writing method, I tend to make outlines so I don’t get off topic. Both of my reading and writing method I have discovered for myself throughout my school years has helped me learn better and just in generally better myself academic wise.

In fact, Wikipedia is a particular type of wiki: largely open (with a modest registration, anyone can edit it), with the goals of an encyclopedia.” (Cummings,2009). I want my students to be able to go to the library and get help with using reliable sources. I honestly do not stand against Wikipedia I just do not want my students to use it while doing work that I assigned for them. In conclusion, Wikipedia is not a bad website I just do not agree with using it for conducting research. I’m pretty sure there are teachers out there that allow that but there should be guidelines while using Wikipedia.

I knew I was good at writing as I was often asked to write for the school magazine or website, but I didn’t know what makes me a good writer. Before attending university, I made a commitment to engage in English classes and join writing workshops, so I could refine my writing. I wanted to learn how to write better essays with a wider range of vocabulary and less grammatical errors. I knew this course would help me improve my writing, though I didn 't know much about the learning process and goals. Through this course, I have realized my weaknesses and strength as a writer and learned how to structure and write an academic essay.

English writing 101 I was able to fully understand how to fix these problems for those essays and in the future. In my Self-Inventory Essay it is very noticeable that my organization is a problem. It is visible that I don’t have good transitions into and out of each paragraph; first off I use “my first strength”, “my second strength” which are very plan and simple. In my Comparative Analysis Essay we can wee that I have come up with better transitions to make the whole essay seem more organized, for example I used more specific transitions like “In Amy Tans Mother Tongue” and for the paragraph after it I used “This shows that the” which make it flow better and be more concise. In my Self-Inventory

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.

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.

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.

I can now take my new skills into future papers to prepare for college. 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.

Other than that, the class has not greatly affected my english. I write for fun in my spare time, so I already knew what I was doing. The major problem I have with my writing is swapping back and forth between past and present tense. Since this semester focused mainly on the more basic grammar points, it has helped me

I really need to admire a great mentor, the Professor Branch who guided me on every mistake that I do. This course is very important for me to meet my writing skill at an optimal level. Writing a paper involves a lot of thoughts. In the beginning, I was struggling in writing a paper in English. Because English is my second language after Nepalese from

For academic purposes, I am constantly working on writing in clear concise sentences for my English/ Speech class. Ironically, when I am posting in some of my other classes I find myself getting lazy with my vocabulary and sentence