While writing is an essential part of a student’s success I managed to avoid papers as much as humanly possible. The reason I have avoided writing isn’t that I do not like to write but that I am not comfortable writing papers that are going to be graded because I have a hard time putting down what I am thinking so typically it is a grammatical mess. I often over use or do not use enough punctuation and have poor choice in wording. Throughout the next fifteen weeks my personal goal is to be able to write a paper with proper grammar and be able to balance my paper. Writing has always been difficult for me and I never know what to write or how to write it, even after making note cards, graphs, and all the other activities that I have been taught
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.
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.
Writing has always been my most difficult part of English. Reading, on the other hand, is something I could do all day; however, with writing, I grimace just thinking about it. It was not that I did not have anything to say, because I actually have quite a bit to say. I just could never figure out how to phrase what I had to say in just right way on the page. My mom taught me to read and write at a young age. After that, I would devour any book that I could get my hands on. However, I have had trouble with writing since it became more than just my alphabet and numbers.
I immensely struggled when writing. Taking my scrambled thoughts and uncoordinated analysis and converting it into clean and understandable words on a page was arduous. I could not express my thoughts in proper academic format. I understood the importance of writing to every subject. It was essential that I learn to condense my ideas and feeling into coherent written word. After much debate, I decided that the best way to improve my writing skills was to take an advanced English course.
Students are subjected to write an array of essays, but they lack the required tools needed to effectively deliver a great paper. They are struggling to write and teachers are needing to design and conform to their current student’s needs. New methods are created and implemented in order to execute the daunting task of learning how to write a well-developed paper. Practical recommendations are brought forth for teachers to use and good teachers will learn to design instruction and activities based on suitable references. Teachers must set goals and deliver their lesson with specific strategies to meet their objectives. They must learn to improve skills dramatically by observing and modifying the students. Teachers must plan strategies in order to help the struggling students catch up or exceed in their writing skills. They must learn to motivate their students by keeping them engaged throughout the writing process if not they risk losing the student’s ability and focus to do better.
Writing has never come easy to me. It may be due to my short attention span or the fact I am not much of a reader. When I was younger
When writing my papers in English I was never sure what topic, I wanted to write about. I rotated between two, one being “The Mistreatment of Animals in Zoos” and the second and my main topic being “Is College Worth the Cost.” When writing these papers, I noticed something about myself. I had grown as a writer compared to when I first walked into English 1100, I had some writing experience but not much my grammar lacked and I was the queen of sentence fragments. Throughout the semester during English 1100, my writing skills improved. From learning, how to format works cited page correctly to learning how to analyze a source. My writing improved wonders with each paper. My paper I, I struggled extremely with formatting issues and how to
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.
The relationship that I have with writing is complicated and we don’t always get along. Although we tend to make up even when I get frustrated and want to quit. When being assigned a paper I struggle with what to write. My words seem to never come out the way I would like and I’m always having to start over and over again. It starts to get frustrating after a while. Needless to say writing isn’t one of my favorite things to do but it’s apart of our everyday lives like texting, sending emails, posting on Facebook, Twitter, and so on. I personally have only used texting as my main daily form of writing since I graduated high school. So therefore I would like to refresh my memory of what I learned in high school and widen my use of writing while in this writing course.
My experience with my academic writing it comes from the past years in different classes, that I have taken here in Texas Tech University. I have taken some couple classes in the science department, a law class. In my law class I had to write an academic paper, explain the different types a law that will apply in a wind energy industry. This academic writing was done in the law class, but that was different from English class. The writing in the science class was little bit like the writing that was done in English 1301 at South Plains. My experience in the class was to compare and summaries article that was chosen by the professor. In this class, it helps me to improve my writing skills little bit more that my high school English. One of my weaknesses in writing is my grammar, that I will go in depth by going to the writing center and other helpful resources. In 1302 I will learn more in depth how to write a research paper, so that I can go more in depth on my work and can use all the different sources on an essay paper. Me intend to build my strength to get better on my grammar is to make sure that I read aloud for my research or argument paper that will be writing for this semester. My goal for this class is to finish with a good grade and learn a lot from the professor. Also, to make sure that I use all help that I get from the class that I will be attending during this semester.
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
Since beginning to write papers in English class, I have had countless successes and failures. While many of my English classes have taught me how to improve my writing, I have not learned very much in others. My most recent English class was last year, my sophomore year. My class was particularly undersized; therefore, it gave each student the opportunity to have additional individual attention. Throughout the class I experienced high points, weaknesses, and even difficulties that I never overcame. Overall, my writing skills improved, but only marginally.
It’s my first class of the year, not knowing what to expect I entered the room with absolute nervousness and fear, after all it was my second English class of college. Although, I’ve never been quite fond of writing in the past, I’ve always done well in the English class in high school. I had yet to work to hard for my grade and no English course I had taken proved to be a challenge in my eyes. But, I have always been a huge procrastinator, if not one of the biggest when it comes to writing. Most of the time I wrote the papers a couple nights before or sometimes even the day of and still managed to average a “C” on all of them. That is why I failed English the first time I took it. I was screwing myself over with this bad habit, but it was so hard to change except for this year. I believed that with the right focus and skills I could finally be a wonderful writer. Throughout this semester to become a better and stronger writer for my future education, I have learned about having a good introduction paragraph, functional conclusion, and peer review.
Over the past few months, I have learned several different writing techniques. While all of the different types of papers were difficult to write, I believe that my writing skills have improved. In fact, I did not understand all of the assignments, but I did try to do my best on all of them. While I should have used more transitional words in between sentences and paragraphs, I feel that I learned a great deal. It is true that I have not had very much writing experience and the writing process is difficult for me. Sometimes, I do admit, it takes days to complete one assignment, but it will be worth it when I am a proficient writer.