Reflection

Shruti Mittal

English 1021 – 2

Professor Harmon           

Reflective Essay

May 17, 2009

Developing as a Writer

As a student of English, since I started at Johnson & Wales University, I have to start this paper by saying that even though I enjoy writing, I never really had a very good idea of writing till now. I am someone who used to write from the top of my head, I would put a lot of my ideas in my writing and would hardly concentrate on the flow of my ideas. My ideas in papers were usually very mixed up and I would not realize that the flow of my ideas is not right because I knew what I had written, but my papers were probably more confusing to the readers of my articles.

When I enrolled in English 1021, I knew that it was not going to be an easy course. Quite a lot was being expected from us, we had to written a large number of papers for this class, the first paper we wrote was an evaluation paper; this was an evaluation between two products that we use. I wrote my paper on the difference between two social networking sites, Facebook and Orkut. This was a paper written by first hand views, therefore, it was still not that bad. I learnt how to put my ideas together much better, we were given specific details to how a paper should be ordered which helped a lot when formatting the information on the paper. The next paper we had to write was the exploratory paper, this was a research paper. I did mine on the Attitudes of Americans affecting the level on Underage Drinking in the U.S. Being an extensive topic, it required a lot of research on my part. I read several different articles and finally chose three main articles to talk about. Writing this paper really helped me improve my research skills, especially when citing in the paper. before I wrote this paper, I just used to cite all the information on the works cited page and not include any citations in text, but after taking this class I have a much better idea on how to cite my papers and know that would be very helpful when writing papers for my many classes to come. As this trimester has progressed my writing has become much better than before and it has also seen a much better improvement. My flow of ideas and my citing has improved immensely and I know I can get much better as I continue to write.

The student writings have definitely helped me even more in this class. The peer critiques that we did in class helped me see the many different ways of writing in class. Not only my classmate’s writings, but also the papers we read i.e. “Abstinence Only Sex Education”, etc… were very helpful when writing my own papers. Our class had some great authors, their papers really reflected excellent writing and everyone seemed to know what they were talking about very clearly and knew exactly how to format their papers. Their approach to the logos, ethos and pathos of the papers was excellent and I have developed great skills following their approach as well.

I think one of the best pieces of writing I had in this class was my position paper, even though I have not yet received my grades for the paper, I felt that I had some really good practice on writing papers by the time the position paper was due. After receiving the results on my evaluation and exploratory paper, I was able to see my weaknesses and was able to address them in the position paper. I tried to overcome all my weaknesses in the previous papers and put in my best efforts for the last one. Since this was also a paper following the exploratory paper, most of my research was already done and I felt very strongly about my viewpoints and was glad that I was able to get a chance to express my views so strongly in this paper.

I think that one of my weakest pieces of writing this term, however, was the first paper I wrote, the exploratory paper. Even though I knew exactly what I was talking about, I was not able to do a very good job of putting everything on paper. I was very confused on how to put in all the information I needed to and had difficulties being able to directly make others relate to the topic. I was able to finally put together the paper, but I feel that if I had more time, I would have probably chosen a better website than Orkut to write my paper on as not everyone was familiar with that social networking site, I would have probably used Facebook and MySpace instead of Facebook and Orkut. I feel that would have probably been a better evaluation which others could have also been able to relate to much better.

As a writer I feel that one of my biggest strengths is getting ideas to write my paper. I do not just write papers following what the professors say every time, but also like to put in a lot of my own ideas. I feel that is strength as a writer that I have because when someone reads a paper they want it to be something different to keep an interest going in the paper and I feel that I can give my papers that extra touch when writing.

A weakness that I do have a writer, I feel is the organization of ideas. I usually keep writing and forget to focus on the format and the flow of the paper. Readers may sometimes get confused when reading my paper because I tend to jump from one idea to the next which sometimes makes my writing a little jumbled up. This is a weakness which I know I have been able to immensely improve though in this English 1021 class.

Before the term began I view argument as just being able to express my side and persuading others of my ideas. My writing reflected my view of argument very clearly; I never really tried to see the other side of the argument, but just imposed my own views on the readers. In this class, however, I have been able to see the other side as well and see where the other views are coming from, I have learnt that realizing the other point of view in an argument and acknowledging it only helps make my argument stronger. Especially when we did the Rogerian Assignment I realized how much it helps to see the views from both sides because then you can actually address the situation keeping in mind how your good points in the argument overcome the good points of the other side.

I have always scored excellent grades in all my English classes till I took this class. I always felt that my writing is great and I do not need any particular help with my writing. However, after taking English 1021 I learnt that there is still a lot to learn. I still think I am a very good writer, but also realize that there is still a lot of place for improvement and practice makes perfect. I look forward to using the skills I have learnt in this class and write much better material in my next classes. I am sure that as I have, even my professors will see a difference in my writing which I believe is going to be much better henceforth.