The semester and English111 is about to come to a close and i’m not going to lie this semester has been pretty hard but it’s also been a learning experience as well. When i first started English111 my writing was not that good i made a lot of small errors within in my papers. Not to mention all the printing and rewriting i had to do to get good results on my papers. But for the most English111 has been tought me a lot and truly been a good experience for me.
The first writing assignment we had in the class was to write a letter to our professor in which we had to tell him why we were here and what we could benefit from his class as well a little background on our selfs. When i first started this paper i knew my writing wasn’t the best but i still used all the techniques i had learned from years back. My first paper i believe wasn’t the best paper i had ever written i believe that because i had tons of grammar issues not to mention some punctuation errors within my paper.
My first paper was a timed paper which i felt put some extra pressure on me because when it comes to timed papers i tend to underperform in those type of situations because of the planning i have to do on the spot. The second assignment we had to do in class was another timed writing but this time it was a personal narrative on a fun memory or exciting time in our live’s. I had did my narrative on the time me and my siblings blew up a swimming pool in our house. One of my biggest weakness is identifying grammatical errors within my papers and on my second paper that was something you could definitely tell was a weakness.
The second paper we did or the personal essay over an experience in our lives showed that i had gotten a little bit better as far as my grammatical errors but there was a new hurdle or weakness i had to tackle and that was my thesis statement when we our first peer review on this paper i got a lot of comments on my thesis statement. The third paper was only about three pages long and it had to be put in APA format which means we needed to include a cover page. I wasn’t good at APA because in high school we only did MLA SO that was also something i struggled with at first but over time i began to get the hang of it.
Over the course of the class in between the 3-6 page papers we also did some little essays over stories we read like hungry in america,are you hooked and legalize it. Most of the times these essays were only one page long and were a recap of what we had just read and covered. These one page papers were meant to help us build up our writing skills in between the bigger essays that were worth more points in the class most of the time the little one page as had meaning behind it. All these small papers we did in class were really set up to help and prepare us for the biggest paper we would do in the class.
This huge paper took i think about six weeks total to do everything which was needed to completed the full argumentative paper. This paper had to include arguments from boths sides as well ten quotes on your topic from good credible sites,a bibliography, a strong thesis statement,outline and work cited. Before we actually started our third paper we spent weeks working on our bibliography and looking for credible sites to backup our claims for our argumentative paper. We had to find ten site and actually write about three paragraphs for each site.
I did my argumentative paper on should middle schoolers be drug tested. Now this was one of the biggest papers i had ever done because the paper had to be six pages long not including the bibliography,work cited and thesis. My topic was a pretty easy one to debate because there was a lot of opinion and information on my particular topic. But before we picked our topics my professor told us to pick a topic that we were actually vested in or cared about so i picked this one because I actually have two brothers in middle school and they tried to drug test one of my brothers.
Once I got my topic and bibliography all squared away it was now time to really work on a draft and plan out my paper. I looked back at all my previous papers to point out some of my weakness so i knew what i had to really work on for my argumentative paper I also look some of my strengths and i found out that i was good at relating a topic back to a personal experience in my life as well as planning out a paper but when it came to the thesis statement and grammatical errors those were two area’s i had to make sure I stayed on topic with.
Throughout the class we used our textbooks to help us learn how our to fix our grammatical errors as well common errors people tend to make in their writings. We also used the book to go over MLA and APA formats. When it finally came down to our argumentative paper we had to use all the skills we learned in class and all the techniques to make our argumentative paper the best paper of the class and really get the most points possible.
While working on my argumentative paper i could really see a change in my writing and how it had grown since i first started the class. I could see my thesis getting way better and my grammatical errors go down I also felt all the papers we worked on and all the little things we did in class really helped to get my writing to where it is right now and i am glad and happy to be able to see such a big change in my writing and the class really did what it was supposed to do which is help our writing skills advance to the next level.
