Reflective Essay: My Preliminary Writing Process

Writing a paper is a long and sometimes strenuous process. In Garrison Keillor’s “How to Write a Letter”, Richard Lederer’s “The Case for the Strength and Grace of Short Words”, and David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’s “How to Write (the Perfect) Email” authors are taught how to craft a compelling piece of literature. To write an effective work, the author must go through the arduous task of planning, drafting, revising, and editing. Each one of these procedure takes time, effort, and patience. If the author seeks to create a noteworthy paper, then it is vital that they follow every step with the rigor and determination mentioned in the professional authors’ writings.

Writing can be a hard activity to grasp. When trying to effectively write there are six key components. These components will help make the writing more effective and understanding for the reader. A reader wants to read something that they enjoy and they can related to. These six key components are fresh, organize, clear, unified, simple, and focus.

Prior to attending UCI, my writing and drafting process was fairly simple: first finding quotes that I could analyze thoroughly and was related to the prompt, write down basic commentary for each including literary devices present, form a working thesis based of my commentary, and then go straight into writing it in paragraph form. I would usually only have one draft of my papers that I would continually update until I turned in the final draft. Many of my English instructors in high school focused more upon understanding analysis rather than the process of writing a strong paper. Therefore, my process worked for all four years of English courses, getting either an A or B in the class. However, the flaws in my process would become exposed once I tried to apply them in Writing 39B. Diction, imagery, and literary devices present only within the realm of the novel is one piece of the puzzle.

The three major problems in my writing were my inability to cite my sources correctly, my poor use of vocabulary, and my constant use of run-on sentences. These three problems showed up repeatedly in my papers. With the help of my teacher, I have been able to learn from my mistakes. I can now take my new skills into future papers to prepare for college.

My goal is to improve writing at the English college level, so that I am able to communicate and write papers clearly for the college class 's requirement and for my future career. Writing is difficult for me because I am a deaf student at the TNCC College. ASL is different from English because it does not include articles, and words such as “is” and “be.” When I write, I have to learn to include all the words that I do not normally use in my native language. This makes it more challenging for me to express myself when writing a paper because the two languages do not match.

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.

The constant decrease in mistakes comes from, learning to challenging myself to reread my paper numerous times until I feel that it is as perfect as I can make it. The grading deduction for every grammar and spelling error really pushed me to make sure that I hadn't left any mistakes in my paper. I also have gotten into the habit of having my peers and my parents read my paper, following the peer evaluation. I like to hear as many peoples' opinions as I can before I turn in my paper. I know this will be a very beneficial habit in college.

Transitioning from high school to college can be overwhelming. Before English 1301, I did not worry about preparing for college. I quickly realized that my little background in writing essays was not enough for college courses. Writing is not just a skill that I will need for English classes. In college, I will have to use effective writing skills in all my classes to complete research papers, essay tests and communicate with professors.

As a first year student who has not studied for 20 years I understand my lack of knowledge and experience in academic writing is because my reading, writing and spelling abilities are based on the osmosis of learning these skills without necessarily understanding the rules (Anderson, et al, 2016 p7). Unsurprisingly, upon analysing feedback from the proofreading websites ‘The Writers Diet’ and ‘PaperRater’, I discovered a number of issues within each principle which affects my ability to be efficient in academic writing. I recorded these findings in the table provided to highlight my strengths and weaknesses and to help assist in the organisation and development to improve my academic writing skills. I can tackle the concern of flabby writing highlighted in ‘The Writers Diet’ by reducing the amount of verbs, nouns and pronouns and, replacing a passive voice with an active voice to create simple structured sentences which emphasises the active source rather than the action itself

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.

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.

Writing a paper has been always a difficult thing for me to do so. I never interest to writing because I find that a lot requirement to fulfill as a well writing paper. They are choice make up idea of topic, and set up a theme. When actually on writing it, I need use correct words choice, and write a sudden type of paper. Also, writing an English paper, there have different tense, such as past tense, present tense and future tense, which are verbs to state when the actions or events.

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.

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.