How To Write A Reflective Essay

Reflective Essay In this semester of English, I wanted to do better than my last. I wanted to become a better writer, a better researcher, and a better communicator. Writing and researching has always been hard for me, so I knew I would have to work hard on all my assignments. I never really thought about myself as a writer, and if I needed to communicate information I would have done it in person. But when I started college and entered my first English class I knew that would have to change. English 101 was a little more difficult for me than English 102. Each essay had a deeper meaning and for me, that made it much harder. When I got into 102 I had a little bit more freedom on what I wanted to write and research. Because of this, I became a better writer.
When it comes to writing, I have never really thought of myself as a writer.
I only wrote when I had to, and even then it was never very good. This semester I discovered the reasoning behind my ‘poor’ writing skills. I wasn’t writing about anything I was interested in. All throughout high school, every writing assignment I had was pick by my teachers and I really had no say in the topic or format or style of the writing. That changed this semester. I had the opportunity to choose and research something I found interesting to me and write about what stood out to me. I wrote this semester’s research paper about birth control, which is a topic I am interested in. In years past, when it came to research, I never really had the chance to express my interests. Although we did have a general essay about empathy this semester, it was still assigned to us in a way that I could easily make it into a topic that related to me and could be written in a way that wasn’t too controlled. Now that I know my writing needs to be personally interesting to me, I know what to write about in the
future. When it came to researching, last semester I had no idea what I was doing. I thought all of my sources had to be extremely informational and incredibly boring to read. Because of that I ended up using some very boring articles about information I really didn’t care to learn about. This semester, I learned that writing research is a balance of all the informational research and my own personal experiences and knowledge. This made researching much easier. Also, when it came to research, I steered clear of long boring articles, and focused on more interesting information that worked into my writing better than other research. I really enjoyed being about to create a project that let me communicate with someone other than the instructor and in a way other than a formal paper. Project three was a great way to end this semester with freedom to choose how we presented information we had researched. When comes to writing essays, I feel kind of threatened my the format and tone of formal research. But my final project allowed me to write in a more casual tone and appeal to a different kind of audience. That is something different that many of my other professors have never done. ] Overall, this semester I really enjoyed the freedom to write and research about topics that interested me. I really enjoyed the assignments. I think they made me a better writer and allowed me to focus on what I do well at. This semester did help me become a better writer, and from now on I will try and aim my writing toward information that I can grow and exceed at.