Personal Narrative: My First Writing Class

The beginning is the hardest part when it comes to writing. Every experience differs per individual. I have discovered that most the time I do not know what to do, but flow with thoughts and see what comes of them. There is much to learn from this process and it will only get better as I continue to become a more capable writer. This is what I have learned about the writing process.

Writing is a method of representing language in visual or tactile form. Before reading this unit I did not realize that I did not have great writing habits and the skills necessary to adequately convey my message. Like with anything in life you need to have a plan or technique, some kind of checklist that you can follow in your mind. In this chapter there are many ideas that will help me become a more effective writer and thinker. One of the most important things that I learned in this unit was how to effectively use the five step writing process. This is something I never knew about or learned in high school. I always just wrote whatever I had on my mind onto my paper and made a few changes here and there. My writing was good but not as good

Preparing for my first writing assignment has been an eye opening experience into what engages me first when choosing what book I want to read. As an avid reader, I realize that I have chosen books that have an interesting title, although now as the writer, I feel the title is not what will make my essay but that my memories within the essay will decide the title. I like to sit at my desk and jot down memories, ideas or opinions that I may have about the particular topic that I am writing about. I also like to reflect on past and present events that have happened, describing the differences in today’s more modern society. Seeing that I already have my essay subject, deciding who my audience will be is the next step in my planning process. Am

The question is, what have I learned in this class. Well to start, as I can remember going all the way back to the first day of class, I learned the key to actually taking my time, to actively think and revise everything that comes my way. I should not just take weird looking things out of context as to just thinking it is junk or not meeting the standards of a pain old piece of work that I am normally used to seeing. I learned that art comes I many shapes and sizes. For instance, a particular piece from artist Chris Ofili, a best of mine but not a favorite.

Welcome to my first shared story, if you enjoy comment, if not comment. I just want to become a better writer, and since sci-fi isn't usually my cup of tea i was planning on writing another story but a high fantasy either in a full on spell arrangement or enhancement like magic type thing.

As a maturing student, I have come to realize there are things that can not be taught to you. Sometimes the lessons can only be grasped if they are self discovered. No matter how basic the lesson may seem, after you learn it, it is something that is bound to change your perception looking forward. For me, that now obvious lesson is however much effort I put into something, I am bound to see equivalent results.

“‘Oww!,’ I said as I fell off my bike.” These are the first words of a personal essay that I wrote in the second grade about learning how to ride a bicycle. I remember them so clearly because my teacher boasted to the class about my use of such an eye-catching introductory remark, so it seems appropriate to use those words here as well. Not only do these words mark the beginning of a growing girl’s literary journey, but also the start to a timeline of establishing a tangible identity for myself that is further revealed within memories of trashy magazines, banned books, and most notably, my own writing.

Overall, I want to be able to use the skills that I have learnt in class in everyday life, not like other things you learn where most people cannot use in the real world. I want to not be caught off guard when confronted and be able to handle conflicts with a mature and graceful manner. I should not have to be scared when someone stands up to me and tells me when I did something wrong, as long as they are not screaming at me or threatening to hurt me if I do not change then who am I to get mad. The sad thing about people in today’s society, is that more and more being are beginning to be aggressive and violent when approached the wrong way. People are actually dying due to road rage scuffles, or hurting each other for the best deals on materialistic

i am fond of analyzing problems that involve decision making process with time constraint. more so, even though i am not really good in written communication, i do like making paper works believing that i can still improve my writing skills, for i believe that learning is a continuous process. lastly, most of my grades in business related subjects are good, so i do believe that i can do

This spring semester I have evolved as a writer and reader. This course has refreshed my memory with basic essential writing techniques and it has made me more proficient when it comes to writing. When it came to writing essays, I use to be so scared to turn them in. I was never a good writer and composing an essay was usually extremely tough. I would have multiple people proofread my essays, but I still doubted my work. Now when it comes to writing essays I feel more confident in my work, I have less grammatical errors, and I don’t feel the need to have multiple people proofread it. It’s nice not having to rely on people to check my work and going back several times to fix the errors that were made. Now I have

Writing has always been something, that through my scores on papers, has been proven to be one of my strong suites in school. However, I think this class decided to burst that bubble. Who I am as a writing has changed quite a lot and for the better due to this class. There are elements to my writing that I do not think improved or could use more tidying up, but comparing my first paper to my last show’s that this class made a bigger impact on my abilities than I had anticipated. That aside, there were also many aspects of the class I did not enjoy. If I looked at the class with rose-colored lenses than all I would have taken away from the last nine weeks was a growing experience, but that is not fully the case. The class as a whole left me with major writing improvements, but there were also some parts to the class that were moreso tedious than helpful.

In high school, I would always receive the highest score in my class when we would write essays. Naturally, I adopted a sense of confidence where I would not spend a lot of time writing and still expect the best grade. However, in the first paper I wrote in COLWRIT R1A, I followed my same routine effortlessly dedicate about one hour to write the essay. When the grade came back for this assignment, I was given my first B in a long time. Bewildered, I made a bunch of excuses in an attempt to justify this B, and claimed that it was because “Berkeley has higher standards than my high school, but I am still a great writer. I will just start dedicating more time to writing my essays.” However, as the semester continued, it seemed as if I could not obtain an A on any of my papers that I had submitted even though I worked on it for a long time. After a deep reflection, I realized that I had been missing more as a writer than I had thought. There was so much more that I can improve when writing my essays. For example, this semester I learned that my thesis has to be narrow, that it is acceptable to deviate from the five paragraph structure, and to use questions as a tool to help me develop an interesting thesis.

One of the easiest and sometimes hardest papers to write are ones that are a reflection on what you have learned over the course. I enjoy reflection papers because it allows me to put what I have thought and felt the whole class onto one paper. It can be difficult because two to three pages really isn’t a lot of space if you feel very passionate but I find a way to make it work. This class was a last minute add on for me because I switched majors to graduate a little earlier. I thought that I was done taking writing classes for a very long time but here I am finishing the tenth week of another writing class. I always get very nervous before taking a writing class because I don’t see myself as the best writer but somehow I manage to still get pretty decent grades. After about the second or third week I realize that I do enjoy writing classes because it gives me an outlet to really write about things that I have passion for while also teaching me something that will be useful later in life.

At the beginning of the semester, I had a couple fears going into this class, mainly because I hadn't written typical essays ever since I was a junior in high school. I had gotten confident in my writing when I joined my journalism class my senior year, in which writing styles are almost the complete opposite as a typical english class, so what had held me back in this class was that I feared that I somehow lost the capability to write a typical, well-formatted, paper. My writing was as good as I thought it had been because when you don’t “exercise” your writing techniques it can be overwhelming when you have to write long papers. Something I always struggled with was making revisions because I didn't know what parts needed them or not. What I really liked was that we got to have peer revisions in order to get that extra feedback which I have learned the importance of now, because you get to see the different perspectives and you can include that in your paper. It also helped that the feedback was required and that we had a paper to fill out to make sure our peers had everything they needed and that they were not missing anything. Another thing I would struggle with is not make use of my resources such as databases, but now I realized the importance in researching and digging for information to provide the best information for papers and that the evidence that I bring up in them is credible. This was especially helpful for writing the argumentative paper because the more

When we had our first big essay to write I did not prepare very well at all for the essay. My biggest problem was I did not have the will to work on it outside of class. Having the paper turned in on time was going to be another problem for me. When I saw what I made on the paper I knew that I had even more weaknesses. My problem was not that I did not use paper rater, but I did not take advantage of the writing center and I did not fix the mistakes that paper rater did not pick up on and the writing center did. At the time I also used very plain sentences, and my intro to the paper was very elementary at the time however, the intro sounded well to me. The essay was full of grammatical errors that I did not fix when I sent in my final copy in to be graded. It was then I realized that the three essays we had make