Reflection About My Writing Class

During this writing course, I have been able to rediscover some of my writing skills that may have been lost since taking a writing class, over ten years ago. I have discovered helpful tools that were not as easily accessible at the time, like websites that will catch some of my grammatical errors and punctuation. Those were definitely a life saver for me.
At the beginning of this course, I thought I had a good understanding of what would be expected of me and I thought that I was an okay writer. I spent most of my college career studying for my bachelor’s degree in psychology doing research papers and reflecting on the research papers of others. This said, I was not very well rounded when it came to writing literary analysis, reviews,
memoirs, proposals, etc.
Before this course, I had no idea how to write a proposal, because I have never been asked to write one before. I found the proposal to be the most frustrating of the papers because I was only given the style of the paper and not the details of the subject. In the proposal I had to research my ideas and come up with a plan of action, rather than reflecting on the work of someone else and I found this very challenging. The most enjoyable papers to write for me had to be the rhetorical analysis and the memoir. I believe that I found these easy to write on because I had a visual picture, one I could watch and the other I experienced first-hand.
While revising my papers I have discovered that I need to read my papers allowed to others to find sentences that seem to be awkward or hard to understand. In each of my submitted papers I received feedback that included, “awkward sentence, consider revising”. I reread my papers, but I read them to myself and not out loud and apparently I was unable to find my mistakes this way.
The other mistake that I saw often in the papers I wrote was that I had written sentence fragments. I honestly did not know exactly what a sentence fragment was until I looked it up online. After seeing the definition of a sentence fragment I understood exactly what I was doing incorrectly. I was writing the way I speak. I made an assumption that my audience knew what I was talking about and I did not create a complete sentence.