Reflective Essay: My Experience As A Writer

Throughout my writing experience I have always struggled with my body paragraphs. I tend to always have a strong introduction but once I began to go into my first body paragraph I lose my train of thought. One of my main issues is that I get to wordy. Which then leaves me with fragments. Lastly, which I’m sure most people have an issue with is basic grammar errors such as, spelling and placing commas. I feel that my writing has had a small progression. Through this class I have learned more writing techniques that have helped me as a writer. One skill that I really liked and plan to use again is making a list. In the list having page numbers and paragraph numbers where I have already highlighted in the book the quotes that I will be using in my essay. It makes things faster and easier to find rather than being stuck looking for a
quote. It saved me time when writing my literary analysis, as I was reading the book and saw quotes that I knew would be useful in my essay I simply just wrote down the page number and paragraph number. As oppose to before, I would just look for quotes as I wrote my essay which would take me longer and was more difficult doing so. In addition, I also now like to always start of my introduction before I began doing my essay, I like to jot down ideas that way when I do began to write my paper I can have a list of things I will be talking about. My writing has changed in a matter of being more organized and learning how to brainstorm more efficiently.
I now struggle less coming up with my body paragraphs because I have a list of ideas of what each paragraph will be about. As with spelling and fragments I still make mistakes. I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t have grammar errors. However, I try to minimize it as much as possible, by going over my paper more than once and by having someone other than myself read it and revise it because chances are they can catch an error that you might have missed or didn’t see. Furthermore, my understanding of 9/11 has changed drastically throughout this semester. Before I did not know detailed information that I now know today. All I knew before was the basic understanding of what it was and when it occurred, I had never went this in depth on learning everything that occurred. For instance, I got to read books where they explained who was behind the 9/11 attack and information about the leader of the organization. In addition, I also learned which towered collapsed first and the way the buildings were laid out through the
inside. I also now know that they had a smaller attack years before the 9/11 tragedy which was why most people didn’t panic and evacuate instantly. I have a greater understanding of what happened inside the towers as they were hit. There were many factors that occurred inside the towers that I did not know of, for instance, how people who made it to the first floor wouldn’t go to the lobby because it was chaotic in there. It was so packed and with so many people in one room the room began to become hot and they were dripping in sweat. Another thing I learned was how the roof was locked because of security prevention of any suicides so they couldn’t use the roof as a form of evacuation. Although I knew many lives were lost I got to read a book where a loved one was in the building. It is different thinking there were lives lost but to actually read and learn about a specific person makes you feel for the family and although you can’t fully understand and feel what that family went through you can get a good idea of the tragedy they went through an the emotions they were feeling.