Jori Pace

English 2010

Professor Reece

December 8, 2014

Final Reflection

My Final Reflection

            In my English experience over the years that I have been in school, I never have felt like I was taught exactly how to write a structured paper. Personally I feel like my writing process has changed quite a bit. I don’t recall ever having to write a proposal to a paper that I have written in the past. This class was helpful by teaching us to write a proposal to get our ideas out there, and get us to basically format and outline what we are going to talk about. A proposal is very helpful to get you thinking about how you’re going to organize your paper. Learning to write a proposal was a huge help to my writing process I am really glad we were required to start every paper out with one.

With every paper my rough drafts were very rough trust me. The revising strategies that I learned and liked the most were first, the peer review by our classmates. It was quite helpful to get our classmates feedback, to give us new and fresh ideas of things we could add and take out of our paper. A lot of the time I would get stuck and that’s the first thing I would want was another point of view to critique and suggest things for me to fix. Another strategy I was taught in this class was to put myself into my audience’s shoes and ask myself, “Why does this subject need to be discussed.” I learned that we need to make sure that we are getting the point across as to why this topic we are writing about might be an issue, and really keep our audiences attention. Through our writing we need to make them care about the subject even more than they already do, and if they don’t then make them interested in it by what we have to say.

The biggest thing I learned about writing is that you need to make sure you are proving your point and that you can convince people to agree with what you have to say about the subject. I also learned that not everyone will have your same opinion but that’s ok, you just need to make sure your audience knows how you feel about the subject and that you are trying to appeal to them as much as possible. I also learned how to recognize ethos, pathos and logos in different pieces of writing, through the exercises and activities we did in class.  

Something that was really difficult for me this semester was taking one subject and writing about it in three different papers. I started to feel like I was repeating myself way too much, I feel like I struggled with finding new information. Another thing that was hard for me was to find articles that had similar subjects but different information at the same time. I thought writing came to me, but this semester I learned that I’m not the best at writing research papers. I guess the kind of writing I am best at is more of a free write. I like to give my opinion and go from there when I write a paper. It is a lot easier for me to write about what I think rather than what someone else thinks. This class challenged me, and now I know that I need to work on the wide varieties of writing and try to become a better writer in all areas.

Something that I would like to improve on for my future writing, is my organizational skills. I would like to learn more about how to organize my thoughts and how to make a paper flow more easily. That is something I feel like my papers lacked was a smooth transitioning flow throughout the whole paper. There are many things that I need to work on with my writing skills, but this class did a good job at pointing out the things that you would normally forget about when beginning to write a paper. In conclusion, I argue that this class did teach me to be a better writer by pointing out the things you would normally forget when revising and trying to get a final piece put together. The information taught in this class will help me in the future when I am writing a paper and hopefully will make me a better writer.