Reflective Essay: My Growth As A Writer

My writing experience about the career paper was more informative than I was expecting. By reading the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH), I quickly realized that there was so much information about a career in medicine, I was not aware of especially with regards to employment and predicted employment rates. However, the most difficult part of the writing process was trying to incorporate personal information into the narrative while using statistics and descriptions from OOH to come up with a coherent essay. For example, with a plethora of personal information and details about factors that has motivated me to pursue a career in medicine, it was difficult to summarize and incorporate information from OOH into my

I have improved very much in my writing process over this semester. I have grown as a writer in each writing process step such as prewriting, drafting, revising and editing, and overall. Outlining, writing a good thesis, getting peer reviewed, and giving myself plenty of time to finish a paper are new strengths that I have learned over the semester. I will reflect on all the topics in the writing process and my growth in argumentation essays. In fact, my previous attitude and feelings about writing was that I disliked it, and I knew that it was a weakness of mine. Now, I feel that I can write a strong argumentation essay. I have the sense that I have progressed a considerable amount from my first essay to my last.

Writing 101 has been a tremendous learning experience for me. It is not my strongest area, so it is my primary reason for taking the class. I took this Writing 101 class to improve my writing skills. In college courses, I have to do a tremendous amount of writing. Writing is also not my favorite thing to do, because it takes time, thought and research. The first week of class, we had to write the first assignment draft. I thought this class will be hard for me and difficult to keep up with the assignments. I disagree with my initial thought. The class definitely challenged me, but I learned so much. My expectation was to improve my writing skills. I would say I met that expectation. However, I feel that I need to continue to learn and perfect my writing to become even more proficient. I learned how to develop strong thesis statements, to conduct online library searches. I started WRTG 101 with a basic knowledge of the writing skills; now I know how to accurately use punctuations, I know how to develop unified, consistent and well-supported paragraphs, and I know my weaknesses in my writing.

Attached is my final project, a cumulative portfolio documenting my growth as a student and as a writer through out English 102. My English portfolio includes revised versions of my research paper, “Global Warming: Hot Topic” and essay “Blueprint Solution for the Poor,” along with the original drafts complete with red ink corrections. In addition, I am also providing this reflection essay demonstrating what I have learned this semester and how I have enhanced my original drafts. English 102 has taught me a number of things and has improved my writing skills. There are many things I have struggled with throughout the semester, but regardless, I have overcome most of my obstacles. Most of all, I have learned how to distinguish good sources from bad sources, how to better use citations, and how to properly develop a thesis.

I believe I am an intermediate writer. I believe I am an intermediate writer because I usually get A's on every writing assignment I do, I've done a lot of writing in the past, and I have my mom who was an English teacher and helps me with my writing.

My experience throughout this class as a writer has been remotely good. I have learned many new ways about how to write an essay because one of my strengths is having a strong memory of the topic and another strength I have in writing is that I am much more experienced on how to describe a subject in great detail and because of this I know what I am capable of doing. I unfortunately still have some weaknesses in writing such as, procrastinating on starting the actual working process and because of this I start to panic on not getting done in time. Over all my writing skills throughout the class has not been what I expected but I did learn more about how to properly write an essay, which will help me out more later on in my future classes.

Most of us were in a situation when we had to say: “I am not too good at it.”, or “I can try, but it is not my field”. For example, somebody will ask me to draw a picture of a cat. I will try. I have seen cats before, know how to operate a pencil, have a flat piece of paper. I am even passing by art gallery on the regular basis, on my way to work. But I still cannot be sure you will not mistake my picture of a cat for a picture of a tractor or an intergalactic battlefield scene. That is how I feel about assignment to write about my writing process. So far, mine I can divide in three steps.

This year has been a blast! There were so many things that just cried out me, and the projects were so much fun! I know I have grown as a writer by starting to have less and less edits on my paper. Making my blog helped me grow as a writer because it made me want to work harder. I wanted to work harder because I knew people would see my work. Sacred writing time has helped me grow as a writer because the time was helpful in the sense that I got some of my best ideas in just 5 minutes. Mrs. Lockwood has been a huge influence on my writing ability. Her instruction helped me grow by fixing my errors. I made many grammatical and punctual errors, that is, before I started no red ink. No red ink helped me to eliminate those errors. I usually don't

Diving into this essay, I was nervous because I have not written anything in about a year! I was concerned about how I would construct my essay because I never wrote a memoir before and I was not sure what to write about. Based on the reading from chapter five of Writing Today, I constructed my memoir around an implied thesis. I think that I am still able to write decently well and that people who read my writing can still understand it. I am grateful that my writing skills have not reverted back to an elementary school level. I think it was a bit risky for me to write about a person and a series of moments in my life to describe how my writing came to be, instead of just how one person influenced me or about just one event. I am also a bit

Coming into San Diego State University I wasn’t sure what to expect out of any of my classes, especially my writing class. In high school I had taken AP composition and language which helped me improve as a writer but even a college level high school course is not the same as an actual college class. Before college and throughout high school I didn’t think of myself as a great writer, I have always been very average at writing. At the start of the year I wasn’t a very strong writer but RWS 200 is a huge reason how I overcame challenges and became a better writer.

Throughout my academic career, I haven’t given writing much of a chance. Instead, I gravitated towards math and science subjects. I believed that writing wasn’t one of my strengths, which caused me to not enjoy past composition courses. This opinion changed during my writing process for “Strategic Devices,” my rhetorical analysis of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail. As I analyzed the skillfully crafted letter, I was reminded of how powerful writing can be, and, when used for good, words can transform the situation that they are spoken into. In English 121, I have learned many new aspects of writing, grown as a writer, and developed a fresh perspective towards composition. Through this progress, I hope to become a positive impact in my sphere of influence.

I think I’ve done more writing this year than I have in the last 4-5 years combined, perhaps even since high school. I don’t remember any significant writing projects I did K-12 except for a term paper on postpartum depression and some occasional poetry. At this point in my life when I really do need the writing skills, I regret not taking papers seriously or appreciating the art of good written communication. Writing objective papers has not been a problem since the layout is simply good logic and researching reliable information. There isn’t pressure to keep your audience’s attention by painting a mental image to get the reader immersed. Even with this journal entry, I’m not anxious about capturing the reader as these are simply my thoughts as they come to me while I type.

When looking back over the previous microthemes and papers I can see how far I have come as a writer. At the beginning of the semester I was a poor writer who could not grasp the important aspects of writing. I had many grammatical errors along with many underdeveloped thoughts. Even though this class was only for a short period of time in order to learn how to write a proper academic paper, I can see how far I have come. My papers may still be sub-par but in many aspects have come a long way. I no longer have as many grammatical errors and can further express my thoughts in a paper. Also by taking this class I have further developed revision skills by learning new tricks such as reading out loud and writing thoughts out as a brainstorming

As a youth growing up I loved to read and write essays, writing always came easily to me. It was a dream of mine to actually write a book. It was my desire to write a nonfictional book, an influential self-help book for children. As an adult after high school my love for reading continued, but I no longer was expected to write papers, so that dream faded as time and life continued. As I began the charting process for nursing, that was challenging for me. In nursing, documentation is short, simple and to the point, that was not the way we were taught to write in high school. For the last 16 years, my writing experiences have been related to nursing documentation. With my recent career change I have been writing more memos, emails, evaluations,

America is a place full of immigrants with no single ethnicity or race. America can also be referred to as the ?Melting Pot? because it consists ingredients of multicultural backgrounds. There are cultures such as French American, Asian American, Italian American and African American. I am Mexican American. My culture has helped me to become the writer I am today. My bicultural background and constant moving back and forth from Mexico to America has both influenced and weakened my writing. Although I was born in America, my Mexican culture has always been a part of my life. I have spent the majority of my life in Mexico, and Spanish is my first