My Reflective Essay

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In Alex Johnson’s text, “Why Isaac Bashevis Singer, Truman Capote, Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf (Among Others) Were Having a Bad Morning,” Johnson discusses the difficulties that college students and beyond face when writing essays. In reading Johnson’s piece, one thing that I found particularly interesting was when he discussed the product versus the process of writing (159). I found this part of the reading particularly interesting because I have found that the way I go about writing essays has changed drastically since high school. Generally speaking, as high school students, the key to success was to meet the deadlines set by teachers. For example, in my senior year english class of high school, my teacher had set various dates for

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reflecting on my progress thus far in this course, I have not only become cognizant of my writing skills and habits, but improvements I need to make to become a better writer. Although writing has never been one of my strong suits, I have learned valuable writing skills and strategies that are applicable to both the professional and academic field. Transitioning from the way I have been taught to write as a high school student has been the most challenging and influential change I have witnessed in my writing. To elaborate, in high school, we were taught the basis for writing any essay regardless of the audience or topic was the rigid five-paragraph essay structure.

This semester was filled with many bumpy roads. I struggled in the beginning of the semester with my writings , as I didn 't feel confident enough to write a well developed writing. I seemed to find myself struggling whereas writing was not my favorable subject. The major errors I had in my writings this semester would be , grammatical errors,work citations, transition words, formatting ,paragraph development, sentence structure , and sentence level issue. Therefore I have set goals to improve my writing in the future.

Since the sixth grade, the blank page of Microsoft Word has been one of my biggest obstacles in writing. Collecting my thoughts, organizing them, and then articulating them was a struggle. Over the last several years I have felt as if my writing has plateaued. Time and time again I found myself staring at the computer screen desperately trying to start my introduction paragraph. Feeling a need to change I enrolled at University of North Georgia in English Composition 1101.

With my written essays, I simply revised the essays as I wrote. So, I assert that this course has helped me learn to manage my writing efforts a bit

Prior to writing this paper, my expertise as a writer still appeared to be on a High School level; however, upon completion of this reflection paper I feel as if I have learned a completely new technique on how to write a paper. I have learned how to be patient with a paper and obey a certain type of writing process, rather than trying to gather all of the components for my paper at the last possible second. Through these innovative techniques and this new writing process this paper has exposed some of my greatest strengths as a writer; consequently, this paper has also uncovered some of my major weaknesses as a writer. Throughout my stretch of four years in High School, writing was always one of my biggest enemies, but what made this even worse was my lack of knowledge on how the writing process essentially worked.

When I moved to the Philippines with my family at age six, I had no idea that I’d wind up locking myself in the room downstairs every day for weeks. I remember refusing to go to school where everyone would speak to me in a language I had no fluency in, and instead feebly hiding in the corner of the room in my new house with the door locked, waiting for my carpool to leave before I would come out. I was terrified and overwhelmed; the culture shock seemed insurmountable at the time and looking back now, it definitely was. Everything in the Philippines differed so much from what I was used to in California, and even from Japan where I lived for a year prior to moving. Never would I have thought that it would be there where I would find myself and become more intact with my culture than anywhere

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 the writing process, the step that I feel I have improved a lot is editing, as I am constantly reading my writings and editing them as I finish them, over and over again before I publish them. The steps in the writing process that I like the most are finding a topic in the Pre-writing step and Drafting. I like having a lot of ideas floating around and think about which idea is the best and the most exciting topic to talk about.

Reflection In this semester, I succeeded in finishing several assignments and some in-class writing. During the writing process, I learned a lot about these different kinds of writing formats and realized my own weakness. As for the four essays that I wrote: summary and response paper, rhetorical analysis, argumentative essay and reflection essay, I’d like to introduce my past English learning experience first, then discuss each assignment individually and express my feelings and reflection.

My Writing Experience 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.

Writing 101 is the first college level writing class I have ever taken. After I decided to enroll into UMUC, I enrolled concurrently into Humanities 100 and Writing 101. While juggling a full-time job and a two-year-old at home, I figured I should start off with what I considered to be easy, introductory courses. Over the past eight weeks, I have gained considerable knowledge in both courses, but Writing 101 has really challenged me academically. When I began Writing 101, I was not familiar with much of the course material and my writing skills were not developed; through the assignments and learning resources, I have now developed the skill set to develop thesis statements and complete coherent essays.

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