Writing is so much easier when you don’t have a ridiculous amount of guidelines you have to follow. With literary freedom, we are able to express ourselves more than if we have to follow a specific set of rules for every thing we write. This is one downfall for high school English. We have to order our papers in a specific sequence while writing about a topic that is chosen for us. This English composition class changed all of that. We were able to write about anything that related to the given type of essay, which greatly improved our ability to fully immerse ourselves into every paper. This greatly affected my writing thoughts about writing; they changed from hating to write for school to actually enjoying it because I was able to find new things about my self while deepening my knowledge for writing. With our first paper, a Literary Analysis, I wrote about the struggles of changing writing styles in college. I reflected on the types of writing we did in high school and how it shaped everyone to write in a passive tone to get more information across to the reader. With this paper, Dr. Schlueter let us write in our own style. This was a big change from what I was used to in high school. I was able to understand different types of writing though the research I performed to find out what kind of writer I was and how I should be writing in college. Without being given specific guidelines, besides “write about a memorable experience involving reading or writing”, I was forced to use my own creativity to write a paper that met the limited requirements (I use the word limited very loosely). This first paper really helped me figure out my style and made and impact on my other papers that I wrote for this class. The evalua... ... middle of paper ... ...ough my writing, not only as a writer but also as a person. As I look back on my first semester of English at Tri-C, I can tell that I have grown in my writing ability. The changes that I have made will impact my writing style and techniques for the rest of my time in college and life. I will need to use many of the different strategies I used this semester for writing my essays through out my college transfer process. After completing my Associates of Applied Sciences Degree through the Recording Arts and Technology program I will be transferring to Baldwin Wallace to complete a Bachelors Degree in Music Business. I hope that I get the change to put all that I have learned this semester to good use in the future, I know that I have learned a lot and have enjoyed so. Thank you for teaching such a great class, it was a great way to start off my college career!
We would do research on a subject or a person, and write about them. We, once again, were not allowed to be unique in our writing or think creatively or critically. This is the time when I was taught the five paragraph essay. As stated in Gray’s article, the five paragraph essay is detrimental to students’ writing. This format for writing is damaging because it doesn’t allow students to express their own ideas about a topic. It does not allow for any creativity or uniqueness in a paper. In tenth grade, I wrote many papers for my English class, but I never once got an A on them. I was led to believe that my writing was weak because I could not relate to what I was writing about. I did not have any emotional connection to the research papers I had to write, and it made it harder for me to write them. I had grown up not being allowed to think critically, and therefore, my papers in high school lacked creativity and deeper
My development as a writer has flourished throughout this semester. The first week of this fall semester started out with writing responses from our readings in the textbook. Looking back through and analyzing my reading responses at the semester to now; I noticed a substantial improvement in not only my grammar skills, but also my summarizing, and in-depth studying of writing adeptness. Another way I have progressed this semester is the vocabulary of my writing has significantly improved and become more scholarly. Another advancement I noticed was that the content of my work has matured, along with my organizational adeptness.
Over the past semester, I have found the most challenging part of this course to simply be the transition from high school composition classes to college. Because writing expectations are so different in college than in high school, even with AP and Dual Enrollment “college level” classes, I first found myself being overwhelmed with the pressure to write the perfect first draft. The pressure came from knowing how much a final draft of a paper contributed to my grade. This left me sitting in front of my computer for hours at a time with thoughts of what I wanted to say racing through my head, but unable to deliver these thoughts into organized, structured sentences. I learned, through writing my persuasive essay, that instead of trying to write the paper start to finish and already in its perfect form, it is easier for me to look at the paper through its different components and focus on them individually, then work to best organize my ideas fluently.
Throughout the semester i only learned few new things but i did improve and solidify my skill of writing. Before my first year of college my skills have always undermined by other high school english teachers and with that came disappointing grades. I am writing this paper as a reflection of the semester and the progress i have made as a writer. I now understand many things that my high school teachers have done a poor job demonstrating and i am grateful that i decided to take my own route in my education instead of their syllabus. I entered the semester with anxiety that i would perform as i did before but i clearly outdid my own expectations by receiving top grades on my essays.
As I look back into my high school years, I thought I wrote papers well. But then coming into a college environment, my papers were mediocre. By overlooking at my past papers, I found that they were unorganized, sloppy and had bad use of diction. From now on, I will use the tools I learned in English 1100-40 as a foundation for the future papers I intend on writing in college. Following the criteria of organizing ideas so that they flow, impacting the reader with diction and also by being creative, will help become an ideal writer. Following the criteria of staying motivated in short and long term goals, taking responsibility for actions and finally the ability to study well will help me develop into a supreme student.
As a student, I have learned many different skills that I will take with me throughout my journey from this course. We have traversed many different types of writing styles, which any college student, or any person for that
Throughout High School, going to English, there were always four questions that crossed my mind. Are we reading a book? Watching the movie of this book? Writing one essay on the motifs of the book? And lastly, I thought this was English so why aren’t I being taught English? My High School experience is a prime example of what Stanley Fish and Maxine Hairston mean when they say that teachers are spending too much time on things that will not benefit students writing skills. Stanley Fish wrote in the New York Times, “What Should Colleges Teach?” and Maxine Hairston wrote in College Composition and Communication, “Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing.” Within both of these articles, Hairston and Fish agree with each other and my High School experience that Composition classes are not focusing on the right things.
Throughout this semester I have learned many ways of writing through two main essays literacy narrative and comparison and contrast. These two essays have taught me how to correctly fix my comma splices, thesis statements, and capitalization. I have engaged in numerous learning material during this summer class. Many times when I thought it would be hard to work on those three developments I never gave up. I gain more positive feedback from my teacher because he pointed out most of my mistakes I made on both literacy narrative and comparison and contrast essays to help me understand what is it that I need to work on. My development as a writer became stronger.
For me, being a college writer means writing well-organized essays that readers enjoy reading. Being a well rounded writer was also important. Each unit in this class challenged me to write in a well-organized, concise way. During each unit, we conducted some sort of revision activity where I was exposed to other students’ writing. As I read their work, I picked up on their use of transition words and separation of paragraphs to make the essay flow. Naturally, I began implementing more transition words in my own work and learned the appropriate ways to split paragraphs. The structure of the class was key to the organization of my ideas which was crucial to the development of my essay. During the third unit of this class, we were asked to identify an issue on campus, conduct research on the issue, and finally propose a solution to correct the issue. At first, it was difficult to get my ideas down and figure out what it was I would research. What I learned in class allowed me to first identify the issue I would research, write a rough draft, and hear what others had written before the final paper was due. This helped me to identify the main points, brainstorm and figure out what additional research I would need to find to support my argument. Being able to organize my thoughts from the beginning made writing the paper a much easier process. This course has helped me to grow as a writer and make
Over the course of this semester I learned a lot about myself as a writer. This English 101 class has really allowed me to expand my essay structure and ways of thinking. This was my first college writing course and it has given me much more freedom when writing because in high school I felt limited and like what we were writing was not very important. In high school I would write essays to just to fulfill the required word or page count and to a degree I still feel like this but maybe that is why I am an engineering major but in this course I actually was able to express my ideas and for the first time really test the limits of my writing capabilities. I really enjoyed being able to incorporate my voice more in my essays and I believe that I developed my own personal style a bit from this. At the beginning of the semester my writing was quite choppy and there was plenty of room for improvement in the overall flow of my essays. Now, I use several different tactics such as outlining to create better connections between paragraphs. I believe I was able to move beyond many of the high school ways of writing and make general improvements to my essays.
Writing is an important part of everyone’s life, whether we use it in school, in the workplace, as a hobby or in personal communication. It is important to have this skill because it helps us as writers to express feelings and thoughts to other people in a reasonably permanent form. Formal writing forms like essays, research papers, and articles stimulates critically thinking. This helps the writer to learn how to interpret the world around him/her in a meaningful way. In college, professors motivate students to write in a formal, coherent manner, without losing their own voice in the process. Improving your writing skills is important, in every English class that’s the main teaching point; to help students improve their writing skills. Throughout my college experience I have acknowledge that
My history with writing in school developed from writing many papers focused on meeting the curriculum and gradually moving into writing papers with subjects I am interested in. In my middle school and high school the biggest method of learning to write papers was having students do MLA format. Mostly the subject was picked by the teacher and the goal was to get the number of pages and the MLA format correct. Many classes we would write the page requirement and move on to the next paper with no correcting or editing at all. College was a new experience for writing because the topic was picked by me. It was much more creative methods of interacting with other students to assist each other in your writing goals. Discussing my writing with other students in small group settings helped my writing thrive. My college English classes challenged me to figure out what method of brainstorming ideas got me the best results. This lead me to writing out my papers by hand first, which is not traditional, due to it helping me keep my thoughts straight when I don’t have others to rely on and talk out my thoughts.
In summary, I had an enjoyable time in my first college English class. I pushed myself as diligently as I could and learned much more than I thought I would. In addition to, my strengths grew stronger and my weaknesses improved as well. I acknowledge I still have some techniques and skills to work on; however, I am willing to put the time in and cannot wait to take English in the future. Writing is an everlasting skill that will be an enormous asset to me; in addition to my future classes, and my career as
During the course of this semester; the variety of writing styles and essays assigned to me in my communication skills class encouraged the development of my writing skills, as well as provided me with more self-assurance in my abilities. My writing, research, and presentation abilities enhanced through practice, determination, and the understanding I gained during this course. With every single writing assignment, I learned new innovative approaches and skills, which enhanced my abilities to improve my thoughts logically, enabling me to write more clearly, and to organize my papers more effectively. At the beginning of this semester; despite the fact that I already knew the terminology MAP: message, audience, purpose; I never really understood the significance of MAP. For this reason, my writing lacked clarity, organization, and my writings appeared less focused on the topics. As a result my research papers and essays did not flow as smoothly from one passage to the next. Furthermore, I was unaccustomed with the precise procedures used when writing an essay. For instance, my previous classes before college, although requiring a reference page, did not require me to include proper citations in my writings. After evaluating the quality of my writing toward the end of the semester, I recognized vast improvements in several areas of my writing. By concentrating on the beginning stages of my writings, I could distinguish ahead of time my audience and my message. As a result, my essays are clear, and I remain on topic. In addition to that using transition phrases efficiently also helps my writing to flow smoothly. The proper use of transitions makes my writings easy to follow from one topic to the next. I also learned that pre-writing...
In the beginning of English Composition 1 I had no idea how to properly write a paper in MLA format. Not only, was passing my goal for the class, I hoped to grow as a writer so I could be ready for college. After taking English Composition 1 it has taught me a lot about writing essays for English classes in college. Through out, English Composition not only have I grown as a writer I have grown as a person.