Reflection On Gsw 1120

Upon entering Columbia College, writing was one of my weaker areas. It was very important that I gained the necessary knowledge and confidence to become a better writer. I didn’t know how to express myself and felt as though my writing was not my interest. As a result of taking English 101, I have gained a better understanding on how to properly research and build a satisfactory paper. Every paper that was assigned seemed like a struggle to complete. Before entering this class, I did not know the meaning of a thesis or why it was important, however, I obtained this skill quickly. I noticed that every paper has an argument and the thesis helps clarify the rebuttal. Now, I have a new outlook on writing. It’s a way to express my thoughts and allow others to see things through my eyes. There is no doubt that I still have a long way to go, but I know if I continue to write, I will get better. Just as I developed more skills in class, the various papers assigned helped to better structure the writer in me. In addition, the subject areas were not only interesting, but very informative and made it much easier to write about my experiences.

Over the past year I had a chance to develop a deeper understanding of what it takes to develop successful paper. Taking English 1010 was a great experience because it prepares students on becoming better writers through college life. Even though this is my second year in college I was unable to take English 1010 the first year, but taking this class truly show me what college professors are looking for when we are ask to write a successful paper. College professors expect every student to be able to evaluate each topic and be descriptive in their essay.

Everybody has their own methods for writing; however, I believe there is always room for improvement. Chapter 3 in Everyone’s an Author has shown me that writing involves processes that need to be mastered through constant practice. It also revealed helpful tips on how to develop writing processes that can help write effective papers.

While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.

After analyzing many of my written works, I highlighted my writing weaknesses along with notable strengths. Evident in my earlier works, my vocabulary was more basic and was not as powerful unlike my more recent essays. Seeking to improve, I started utilizing words I learned during the year

This year I have learned a lot from College Writing, this class has taught me a lot about my own writing and what makes a good essay. I have learned a lot about myself as a writer and as a person throughout the course. In this reflection of the past semester I will be going through my past papers and talk about what I liked and how I could’ve made them better. I will also be going through the activities that have shaped my writing the most. Hopefully, I will be representing how I have grown as a writer throughout the year because of this class. Before taking this class I was already relatively confident in my writing abilities and was excited to take the class. Now that the course is completed I am even more confident in my writing because of all the new techniques and helpful tips I learned.

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.

I used my many different techniques for my papers throughout the term. Some of the techniques and methods were more helpful than other techniques and methods. I excelled at some method that James D. Lester recommended to try and I failed at some other methods that she recommended. They were some methods that I haven't grasp yet and can definitely work on in the future. In this paper, it will showcase what I did well at during the writing process of writing a research paper and what I could have improved while writing the research papers throughout the term

I have also realized that there are going to be many times you have to scrap ideas and start over. This semester I have realized that I try and perfect my assignments too much to where I start to crunch on time because it wasn’t to my expectation and I started over to many times, that there is in fact a way that too much thought can be put into a paper to where it becomes cluttered. The biggest growth I’ve seen over this semester is overall just my writing in general. At the beginning, my writing was very basic. My sentences were all around the same size and it was just not at the level of writing I would have liked it to be. The biggest thing that helped me with this over the semester would be just reading and editing mine as well as other peers’ papers. Towards the end of the semester it became easier to write, whether it was a personal, research, or

I have learned and improved many skills during my time in GSW 1110. Before I took this class I was very unconfident in my academic writing abilities; however, I have greatly improved them during this last semester. I have learned how to gather and organize credible information; write to audiences with opposing viewpoints; identify the audience I am writing to and cater my writing toward them; draft texts using personalized strategies; use grammar, punctuation, and mechanics to make my writing more interesting; and think critically to synthesize multiple points of view. I believe the skills I have learned and refined will allow me to move on to further college writing classes, as well as help me for the rest of my life at work and in the community.

Even the smallest changes to a paper can become a great improvement. From the first papers completed at beginning of this course to the last papers submitted far more recently, my sentence structure, grammar, and syntax visibly improved. During the first few weeks of the course I struggled with the exclusion of verbs and tenses I used far more often than I realized. “Using passive voice to avoid attribution is, therefore, a problem. Fortunately, the solution to avoiding passive voice is relatively simple: use active verbs (Smith, 80).” After my professor informed me of my mistakes, I took advantage of the opportunities given to rewrite my papers, even when I received an acceptable grade to begin with. By doing this I found ways to improve my writing even more and followed Mrs. Patria’s guidance until I felt that I completely fulfilled the requirements. An example of this: the four word movie essay written about Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow originally received a grade of ninety percent, but when I chose to rewrite it I managed to bring the grade up to a ninety-five percent as well as learn from my mistakes.

What did you learn this semester? The golden question from all friends and family members when you come home for breaks. One would think that since my first language is English, writing papers would be easy. It should be, but it is not. I have learned that my writing was not as good as I thought it was. I have learned that throwing a paper together last minute does not work as good in college as it did in high school. I realized early on in the semester that I have trouble analyzing pieces of writing, I can give a summary all day, but analysis is not a strong suit of mine. Sometimes teachers believe that we automatically know how to write, we are not born with reading skills. It would be hard to believe if someone said that they learned nothing from English 111. From English 111 I learned that summarizing is not the same as synthesizing. I also learned that I needed to strengthen my critical reading, thinking, and composing skills. I also gained a better use and understanding of rhetoric knowledge such as audience, purpose and evidence. In conclusion English 111 taught me to be more aware of my conventions in writing. I believe that I have gained knowledge in critical thinking, rhetoric information, and conventions from this semester that have strengthened my writing and I can provide examples to back the clause.

Throughout the semester, I have gained skills necessary for understanding and utilizing logic while writing. I am now aware that for any writing to be scholarly, it must possess an introductory section, a body and a conclusion section. Further, I am now able to understand as well as utilize most of the basic techniques useful in pre-writing, revision and editing. Through writing the “downloading from torrents” paper, I acquired skills in word processing, sentence elements, and punctuation. Further, I developed some special skills in writing a website analysis which is a critical aspect in contemporary learning as argued by Flateby (p 182). As the semester folds, I believe that I have gained the prerequisite skills in writing and critical thinking. However, I need to improve much on some of the common problems in writing that seems to disturb me especially grammar.

Over the course of this past semester, my ability to write has improved tremendously. Prior to undertaking this course, my expertise in writing was not as fine-tuned as it should have been. I had never previously been enrolled in a class specifically tailored to writing-- which was quite clear. Upon reading my past works, it becomes apparent that my writing style consisted of fluff, small words, and inconsistently structured sentences. These problems have, for the most part, been remedied with the coursework I have tackled in College Writing. Rather than long, drawn out papers that take an eternity to reach the primary point, my recent work is much nicer in terms of composition and grammar. I credit these improvements to the three primary

Over the course of this semester each paper that was written helped to introduce me and my fellow classmates to different formatting, and genres of writing. A lot of knowledge was gained from writing these papers and I was able to compare and contrast the disciplinary writings and notice what makes each of them stand out. Reflecting back on these individual papers helps to express what I have learned.