My writing styles have changed drastically over the past four years of high school. This memo will explain how my writing has changed and how my knowledge of writing has improved.
Aspects of My Writing during High School
During my English courses throughout high school, I learned many things from writing simple journals, research papers, and a single term paper. During high school, I was laid back and procrastinated for much of my work. During the latter part of high school when I wrote my term paper my senior year, I found out that working a little every night writing a few paragraphs helped me out greatly. I was not just throwing something together just to get the grade and the paper finished. I spent time on the paper and
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I do this so the information is true, and also in order from which events have occurred. When I wrote my term paper my senior year I was well organized. I was required to write about an event in history. I chose India Uprising of 1877 as the topic of my paper. This topic was not interesting at all, but I chose to write about it. When I finished writing my thesis and outline, I wrote note cards about the different topics, which allowed me to gather all my information and organize it in which different events occurred. When I was finished with the paper, it sounded and read consistently and it all flowed together.
How These Experiences Prepared Me for College Writing
I have written many different types of papers for all of my classes throughout high school. For my science classes, I have written several labs in the form of essays. Writing the essays was different for me because I did not really know that science had much to do with writing. It took me a while to gather all the information I needed to finish my lab assignments. Writing lab reports will definitely help me in my science courses in the next four years.
The journals I have written came from my four years of high school English. Everyday I came to class there would be a topic on the board. I took five minutes each day to write about the given topic. It was brainstorming and giving our input on whatever the topic was. I think
Throughout the course of freshmen year I have developed different skills and opinions on writing. I feel I have created a more mature style of writing and a better understanding of literature. I have changed my view of writing over this semester and acquired a strong liking for it. The importance of writing has become more visible throughout the past few months. Writing is crucial in many aspects of a person’s life. I have grown to be a more powerful and well built writer throughout this course.
After taking Honors Written and Oral Communication freshman year I have changed as a communicator. I have grown in many areas as a writer and speaker; however, I have also have skills that need improvement. From the Fahrenheit 451 essay to the six-word memoir, my writing capabilities and experience has changed. I have sincerely grown in certain areas whereas I have also fell short in other areas.
Writing journals helps with flow and consistency. Before this class I could never write about a topic for 300 words. Whenever I had to write a paper, I would always draw to a blank and never get anything done. Thanks to writing journals I have improved on my flow and consistency to write stuff down.
My high school years were not spectacular, nor were they terribly productive.I left high school without learning how to proficiently write an essay. However, CUNY's Borough of Manhattan Community College afforded me a desperately needed second chance. It was at BMCC that I sharpened many of the skills I should have mastered in high school. I was able to greatly improve my writing ability. I began college as a student who found writing a 2 page paper to be a terrifyingly daunting task, but due to practice and numerous resources offered by CUNY, I soon was able to compose papers consisting of 10-14 pages with confidence and efficiency.
When I took this English 101 class four months ago, I wanted to learn how to develop my writing skills and to communicate my thoughts clearly in writing using the English language. My parents are both French specking Cameroon, so I grew up in a French specking house. Before I assume everyone could understand what I was writing and I did not put too much effort to learn the technicalities of the English language.
Finding your own writing process is crucial for a writer in order to write a successful paper. Everyone is unique and everyone’s writing process is going to be unique as well. A writer’s notebook is a perfect way for people to record random thoughts, dialogue you hear, and any other ideas you might hear. Brainstorming is a key technique to get started when composing a paper. Brainstorming allows you to think of different topics that would fulfill the requirements needed on your topic assigned. Freewriting, clustering, listing and outlining, and collaborating are also some other techniques that when practiced could come very useful when writing a paper. Having the ability to use either of these five techniques would help tremendously when composing a paper.
One of the tips that has really helped me the when writing and improving my writing is, write your thoughts before organizing them. My mind flows when I am writing a paper or thinking about the topic and I sometimes forget to write everything down, so before I write a paper I sit down and really think about my topic, then I just write words and phrases that come to mind so that when I start my paper I have a general idea about what I want to write.
Teachers, parents, and friends often tell students exactly what the writing process should entail and how long it should take. However, the older I get, the more I realize that the writing process varies not only from person to person, but also from one writing project to the next. Throughout my years of life, I have written countless papers, ranging from a persuasive speech to an extensive research paper, and each project requires an altered version of my personal writing process. While each individual has his own writing process, there can be many similarities between different writing processes. Finding one’s individual writing process takes trial, error, and repetition. When an individual finally uncovers his unique writing process, better thought, work, and writing is produced.
The Memo will directly address my growth as a writer throughout my time in EH 101-13. It will also highlight my current strengths and weaknesses in my own personal writing style.
It is essential to understand that classes taken in grade school do not give students a full understanding of each subject. With the topic of writing, there will always be a new lesson to learn, an aspect to improve, or a differing way to explain. Author Craig Vetter states in Bonehead Writing, “This is your enemy: a perfectly empty sheet of paper. Nothing will ever happen here except what you make happen.” Each story, essay, or response comes from a writer’s experiences. With each attempt at a new piece comes an underlying story of emotions the writer is facing. Each person’s writing is unique and the ideas people have are related to their past experiences and what they believe to be familiar with when deciding which writing style to use. As a high school student, I have learned many things about writing that helped me become the improved writer I am today, but the most essential advice I have received is practice makes perfect. Although there is no actual perfect way of writing, I have discovered that each essay I write, my writing improves. It is easier to spot mistakes, find areas to improve, and ponder elevated word choice to use.
While attending writing class, I learned about the 4 steps in writing, bases for revising, organizing, and connecting specific information, and I also learned about the different types of essays such as descriptive, narrative, process, cause and effect and argumentative essay. I have been a student at Milwaukee Area Technical College for 1 semester, and over the course of my enrollment I have grown and learned more that I knew prior to attending this writing course. Participating in this writing class has taught me so much more than stuff about literature and language, it has taught me another way of expressing myself. I have learned here how to write and express myself, how to think for myself, and how to find the answers to the things that I don 't know. Most importantly I have learned how important technique, outlines and organization are. My goal in this paper is to inform writers about how my writing skills have improved.
College papers, is the first form of writing that I am currently encountering in my life. I will continue to experience this form of writing in the future as I continue to embark on my collegiate journey. Currently, I write 4 papers at least per semester that I am enrolled in school. These papers are expected to follow a certain format before they are
After reading these two essays, I realized my writing has changed immensely, but my reading did not differ at all. I still had a negative attitude towards reading, all the essays assigned were very lengthy and I would lose interest fast. Along with being a slow reader, it would take up to an hour to finish the essay. Every time I had to read for class, I would try to push it off to last minute. I never thought my reading would change because I dreaded reading for school. We only had a little bit of the semester left so I thought my view wouldn’t change. Then our last essay was assigned, and it was a game
Since beginning to write papers in English class, I have had countless successes and failures. While many of my English classes have taught me how to improve my writing, I have not learned very much in others. My most recent English class was last year, my sophomore year. My class was particularly undersized; therefore, it gave each student the opportunity to have additional individual attention. Throughout the class I experienced high points, weaknesses, and even difficulties that I never overcame. Overall, my writing skills improved, but only marginally.
How do I always write, what is or do I even have a writing style. I usually don’t write a lot on my own, unless it’s for academic purposes. Like writing short, long essays, or research papers. From what I can remember since High School I have written about eight to fifteen short and long essays. I have written 2 research papers, that were both 10 pages long. I always procrastinate before I start to write my essays. And when I finally start, I read the instructions once or twice, and I just start typing, fixing my errors, like grammatical, along the way. Write a paragraph or two, do something else, come back to it later to write something else, and so on. Until I am close to finishing, then I go ahead and fix my sentences, add clutter to them to make them longer to meet the page requirements. Adding things like “The Dean of the University of North Carolina in Charlotte said,” instead of “The Dean of UNCC said,” Which usually I have a page or two left. So I have to add that much clutter to finish the essay. Which then I felt that it lost its meaning a little. The only tool I used is the Microsoft Word grammatical error tool. I usually didn’t ask for help, or really know where it was unless it was my teacher. But the only thing I would maybe ask for help is on a paragraph or two at the most.