Reflection On Critical Rationale

Throughout this semester I have written several essays and journals using techniques both important and unfamiliar to me. This class helped me use these techniques and steps that are involved in creating and formalizing an essay. The writing process of an essay includes information gathering, creating ideas, and writing it on paper to create a cohesive and organized paper. In complete certainty I can say I lack many of the skills necessary to create such a paper, but during this course I have learned some writing methods which I believe have improved my essays. The essays and journals in this portfolio reveal both my strengths and weaknesses in my writing and how I have both continued to make the same errors and improved in other areas.

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.

The transition between high school writing and college writing marked a difficult time for me. In high school, I never had the motivation required to develop my writing skills and writing essays was not my forte. I would express my jumbled thoughts on a paper and turn them in for a decent grade. Upon coming into English 1101 with this lax mindset, I immediately encountered many weaknesses in my writing, struggling with constructing an essay with a proper direction, style and grammar. As I began reviewing my problems, I started understanding these issues and eventually learned to improve upon them. From my portfolio, I hope to demonstrate my improvement upon these weaknesses in English 1101.

...ed my writing skills in different ways. One way is Writing 20 taught me how to find a balance between "They Say, I Say." Also, Writing 20 helped me cut back on my wordiness, which made the ideas I expressed to the reader clear to understand. After taking Writing 20, my writing has less comma and shift errors. With the reduction of shift and comma errors, my writing's flow has improved. Though both essays show improvement, I still need to improve areas of my writing. One area I need to work on is repetition. Sometimes I repeat the same thought in two sentences, when only one sentence is necessary. Another area I need to work on is my awkward sentence phrasing. In a few sentences, I have awkwardly phrased them, which makes the sentences difficult for the reader to understand. After taking Writing 2, my repetition and awkward phrasing will become problems of the past.

In the course of this semester of writing, I grew more than I ever had in my ability to write well. I remember on the first day of class several other students were talking about how hard this writing professor is. I was a bit worried and even thought about switching to an easy professor for a guarantee A so I can get a 4.0. Now, I am grateful that I chose to decide to work hard for a 4.0 instead. Even though I may not get it, I am still glad I stayed because for once, I learned and became a better writer. I can see that my knowledge of conventions definitely improved from last semester. I really loved the feedback for my assignments, since it allows me to realize what I need to improve on and what I should keep doing. Unlike the previous semester, the writing professor only told us our grade on the very first assignment after two months. There were no feedback on how I could improve either, so I had no idea if I was having trouble with anything. Prior to this course, I always had trouble writing sentences and organizing them in such a way that flows and delivers my idea well. I also rarely outline or plan out how I will write a paper too, and even when I did, it was very vague. Out of the five learning outcomes, I grew the most in rhetoric knowledge and writing process from the reading responses and 4 assignment.

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.

In high school, writing essays was my weakest link. When I began my first semester of college, I still had that trouble in my first writing composition class. I improved significantly from gaining organization and length. When I started my second writing composition class, my grades for my paper sky rocketed! The essays I have written though out this semester have shown improvements in context and organizations, however, I still have some room for improvement on reasoning’s and thesis statement.

At the beginning of the semester, I had a different idea of what is considered as good writing. In my first rough draft for my first essay, “Post-secondary education and cultural backgrounds”, I demonstrated mostly of my preconceived idea of what good writing is suppose to be. I tried to sound intelligent by asking rhetorical questions and using big words improperly. I noticed that there was no harmony and organization on my essay as a whole. I had no idea what MLA was. With the help of the Writing Center and my determination on continually revising my essay, my scattered ideas developed into cohesive statements. I learned the use of topic sentences, thesis, reference page, page number, and other given structures on writing a paper. As I tried to develop my skills to becoming a good writer, my writing and knowledge has slowly grew into the accepted academic text.

Throughout this semester we have had to write many types of essays. Although this is a college English class there is still room for improvement. I made much improvement during the semester of the class. I was able to identify my weaknesses. I learned how to make improvements to the areas I was having problems in. Although each essay we did was different I was able to begin with one essay and throughout the semester turn it into two other essays. I was able to change my style of writing to fit the type of audience I was working with. I will continue to work on my writing and keep improving it.

Writing papers has been one of my biggest fears as a student. High school English class prepared me for the editing of my essays, for example, grammatical errors, spelling, font errors, and things that were under the category of fixing my paper. I realized that the writing process requires more than just editing, you have to understand that the paper is like a human body, it cannot function if every single part is not effective. I can certainly say that I have improved as a writer a great deal and this portfolio and the final revised drafts of my work certainly can argue for that. English 101 was certainly different from my other English classes; we actually focused on different parts of the writing process in each class instead of wasting our time discussing the same components of the process over and over again. As I reflect on my experiences throughout the semester of English 101 I am aware that I have met very important requirements of writing that I feel were very valuable for me as a student and my writing has improved progressively.