College Prep Writing Class Analysis

When I started this class, I believe I had strong writing skills, and now I believe these skills have strengthened, making me a more conscious writer. Before this class, I have not focused on aspects such as sentence length and specific words that I am using. Instead, I simply wrote and worked on proper grammar. My essay writing skills have definitely improved throughout this class simply due to the fact that I spend more time writing my essays. Now that I have mastered more skills, I can utilize them in every essay from here on out. While I know that I still have room to improve, I am pleased by my progress and I feel more confident about my writing. I have always enjoyed writing essays, but this class has helped me more fully understand the complexities of writing an essay. Previously, most essays I have written have been standard for English classes, and
have not taught me how to write different types of essays. This class has greatly improved my knowledge on the different types of essays, and I can clearly see the distinction and purpose for all of them.
College Prep Writing has been a useful class, and I am proud of what I have accomplished within it. One of the most important aspects I have developed in College Prep Writing is remembering to do the entire writing process, instead of simply just typing out an essay and turning it in. For the scholarship unit, I had to brainstorm topics and start my essay well. In previous classes, we have completed some aspects of prewriting, but it often was not necessary. Scholarships are often only a few hundred words, so it is necessary to prove your point in a small amount of space. One of the most useful essays we wrote in this class was the Rhetorical Analysis. The Rhetorical Analysis truly helped me focus on the types of paragraphs I write and how to connect them. Introductions and conclusions have always come naturally to me, but sometimes I struggle with what information to place within the body paragraphs. This class helped me understand that for a formal essay, typically a body paragraph will contain a transition
sentence, a topic sentence, and often a quote. Learning about transitions between body paragraphs has also been helpful. This makes my writing flow much easier, and helps the reader understand the essay more efficiently, making my essays much better. In both the Rhetorical Analysis and the Annotated Bibliography, we learned how to cite our sources. I already had a good grasp on MLA formatting, so that essay simply refreshed my memory on a few aspects. APA formatting, however, was new to me, making it extremely useful. I know that APA formatting is used all the time in college, so I am glad to have learned a new skill that will highly benefit my schooling. Finally, this class helped me proofread and peer edit my essays before turning them in. We learned about English during the ACT unit, which helped me understand sentence structure and placement of commas. I can now go back and proofread my essays with better accuracy. I have also found that having others edit my essays can be beneficial, as they will often catch mistakes that I missed. My mom, I have found, is one of the best people to go to for this, so I now know that I can utilize her help in the future. Of all the pieces we wrote in this course, I find the Rhetorical Analysis the easiest to write due to my familiarity with the formatting and type of essay. Rhetorical Analysis has not been a new concept to me, as we wrote one in English II last year. Thus, I found that essay to be very easy to write, as I already knew what to write and how to write it. The fact that we used MLA format in that essay also helped because I have always had a strong understanding of MLA, as we have used it in all of my other English classes. I find Rhetorical Analysis to be rather simple, as there are set guidelines of what to include in the essay, which leaves little room for misinterpretation. In some essays, it can be confusing about what to write about, so Rhetorical Analysis makes it easy to understand the information necessary to correctly write it. While the Rhetorical Analysis essay may have been easy, I still found it useful, as I was able to develop my skills and analyze the speeches more accurately. The Prairie Meadows Scholarship essay was the most difficult essay to write, as I find it difficult to talk about myself, and there are few requirements on what to write about. In our society, we are often told to be humble and to not speak about our accomplishments. With this lesson ingrained into me, it is now difficult to write about myself, as everyone is told to downplay their accomplishments. Scholarships ask you to be proud of your accomplishments and discuss them in great detail, which is not easy for me. I also struggled to find stories or specific events to write about. Often, in scholarship essays we are told to pick a time we did something and discuss how it helped us. I find it difficult to pick a story and write about. While the format of the scholarship essays were easy, I found it hard to create content to put into them. The most useful unit, I believe, was the one over APA and Annotated Bibliography, as I will utilize it for years in college, and I had little knowledge over it before this class. Most of these units relate to aspects of my near future, such as scholarships and the ACT. I tend to do well on standardized tests already, and scholarships are not necessary to succeed, though they do help. Already, I spend time effectively studying, and I have a note system already worked out, so while those units showed me different ways of doing them, they were not necessary. Learning APA format and how to write an Annotated Bibliography, however, is necessary to succeed in college and I had little to no knowledge about them beforehand. Many college essays I will need to write will likely be an Annotated Bibliography, so learning what it is and how to write one will enable to pass my college classes more easily. Being successful in college is incredibly important to me, so learning this skill has been a good experience. In previous years, I have only ever used MLA formatting, so learning APA was definitely useful. While I knew that other types of citing sources existed, I had no idea how to actually do them. As APA is one of the most common types of citing sources, I feel more prepared for college and my future. These units have all helped prepare me for college, and I feel more confident about my writing, so I am glad to have taken this class.