English Reflection Report

My Reflection on English 100 In this reflection, I want to talk about my main goal for this class. This goal was to get confrontable with writing. While it is a simple goal, it’s something that I think all writers need to accomplish if they ever hope of writing well. But, what do I mean when I say “get confrontable with writing?” I mean that writers need to be able to enjoy writing and not be afraid of there writing. This is the first wall beginning writers need to break down. Coming into this class, I already somewhat accomplish this goal. I felt pretty good about the quality of my writing. While I don’t exactly like all type of writing (personal writing), I still enjoy the actually writing part and have fun doing so. What I wanted to
work on in this class was the not being afraid of writing part of my goal. Not being afraid of writing means you are proud of your content and willing to share your writing with others. I have always been cynical about my writing, thinking that people would only criticize my writing and essentially call it trash. Usually, I would skip out on peer response day in classes in high school since it wasn’t counted against me. But in this class, you had to do peer response or you lost a decent amount of points. At first, I was pretty nervous to share my writing with others, but it actually went pretty well. All the people I did peer response with were pretty cool people and understood what I was trying to get at in my papers. The more peer responses I did, the more confrontable I got with sharing my writing. Peer response provides constructive criticism and feedback that I the writer would have never thought of when writing. This feedback was very useful and made me realize how important it was to the writing process. Not only that, but it also made me prouder of my writing since people would often agree with my ideas. In the end, I think that I am definitely more confrontable with my writing. Aside from accomplishing my goals, this class also reinforce and refined my skills as a writer. Like I’ve said before, I felt pretty confident about my writing skills, but was I actually as good as I thought. This class was a good opportunity to gauge my writing skills. The way I measure myself was by the instructor conferences, revision, and the final draft. Of course there was more things like what I knew before class lectures and the impromptu writing exercises, but these were the three big things. Instructor conferences were nice, because you got expert feedback on your paper and could discuss how you wrote your paper. It’s nice having someone who is consider an expert (writing center or instructor) look over your paper and comment on your paper (positive or negative). The way I looked at it, if I overall had good content and structure with limited mechanical errors, I did pretty well starting off my paper. The revision part was the next big step, because it a test to see how I could improve my paper. After letting your thoughts collect for a few days, you can look at your paper in a new perspective. Often, you could see your mistakes and fix them and strengthen your current content for a better paper. Along with the advice form instructor and peer conferences, I felt like I could make an overall stronger paper. Now with this new paper, it’s time to turn it in and see how well I did. Judging from the first two papers, I can say that did pretty well in writing my papers and overall fell a lot more confident in my writing. Overall, I felt that this class was a definitely a worthwhile experience. It strengthen not only my writing skills, but my overall feelings towards writing.