English 101

Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I trudge up two flights of stairs with the wind whipping at my face as my fingers feverishly click out the final text message I need to send before class starts. I walk into the warm, musty computer lab and sit at my usual spot with the view of the library through the tree limbs. I am always sure to come to English class because I know of my terrible history in this subject area. I have always struggled with English and before this semester had assumed that the college level class would be the death of me. As I read over the syllabus for this class it states that we will learn to understand writing assignments as a series of tasks and develop flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proof-reading the assigned papers. I shuddered at the sheer thought of having to write five papers. Narrative, Evaluation, Profile, Position. These words might as well have been written in another language because I had no idea how to differentiate between them. Despite my fears, I believe this semester’s English 101 course has truly helped me develop my writing skills and advance to a more capable writer. Throughout my life English has always been my most difficult subject. Even back in elementary school I would have 100 percent averages in all of my other classes except English. I do not know what it was that challenged me so much but I had a terrible time. With the start of my high school career coincided the beginning of my paper writing experiences. I would work for hours each day trying my best to write a paper that made sense and would flow smoothly between paragraphs. My countless hours of work, however, never seemed to pay off. Every single paper that I had returned to me from my teachers was always covered in bright red Sharpie marker, usually with a large “B” circled somewhere on the front. The words “hard to follow” were usually emblazoned somewhere across the top and then throughout my paper in that same smelly red