Personal Reflective Essay: My Writing Experience

When I chose Psychology as my major, I was certain that I will be applying for graduate school in the future. The only problem was figuring out what psychology field I wanted to go into. While not knowing, I was still working to create a well-rounded resume by seeking experiences and develop new skills. That helped me a lot when I decided to go into Occupational Therapy as my graduate program. I felt like I was prepared mentally and that I had a good list of experiences under my belt. Nevertheless, the process of applying to graduate school is scary because of the fear of rejection. I need to stay positive and confident in myself knowing that I have done everything in my power to become a competitive applicant. Like everyone else, I have my

Over the past four months, I have made great strides as a writer. The area where I have seen the most growth is in my use of the writing process. Prior to my enrollment in this course, I would sit down and write all my papers in one sitting. This class has taught me how to lay out a plan for my papers. I have learned how to effectively brainstorm/research, draft, and revise my writings before I complete them. Also I have learned to not just stop there, instead I am now going back and reflecting on my work after I complete it. This allows me to identify where I prospered and also where my downfalls may have been. With this information, I am able to apply this to future writings of mine; lessons that will stay with me forever.

At the beginning of this semester, I had little knowledge about the APA writing format and how to look for relevant sources. I also found it very difficult to build an argument and track down solutions. Now, on the other hand, I can differentiate between the sources that are valuable and

Writing is one of the most important skills that I have learned throughout my years in school. I have learned that no matter how much I love or hate it, writing is a necessity; I might as well try to be good at it. Writing has been in my life for many years. There are many types of writing, educational writing and personal writing are two that I will mention in this essay. I have learned how to allow writing to help me in my daily life. When I began writing I hated it, however, I have learned the many uses of it, and it has become a huge part of my life.

     One of the techniques I am going to use through out college is talking to

America is a place full of immigrants with no single ethnicity or race. America can also be referred to as the ?Melting Pot? because it consists ingredients of multicultural backgrounds. There are cultures such as French American, Asian American, Italian American and African American. I am Mexican American. My culture has helped me to become the writer I am today. My bicultural background and constant moving back and forth from Mexico to America has both influenced and weakened my writing. Although I was born in America, my Mexican culture has always been a part of my life. I have spent the majority of my life in Mexico, and Spanish is my first

The writing process has always been a challenge for me. Especially if it has a due date. In the past, I have always procrastinated the process and that never ended well. I knew something had to be done and I needed to come up with ways to make writing a little easier. So, I sat down and I started to look at writing in smaller steps. I started to plan how I was going to finish a paper without getting so anxious and overwhelmed. This process has helped me a lot along the way and I am going to share my process with you.

One skill I greatly improved upon was my ability to gather and organize information. On my first paper, Arguing a Position (AaP), I did very poorly on this. The paper was arguing that the mass surveillance by the United States government had gone too far and was suppressing individuals’ freedoms. I spent a long time researching for this essay. When I went to sort through it all I had found that I had gathered way too much information and I had not organized it in any useful way. This put me behind the rest of the class in the writing process. I was still typing down to the very last day, while everyone else was editing, which hurt the quality of my essay. I did, however, learn from these mistakes. In my second essay, Proposing a Solution (PaS), I proposed a solution to the algae problem in Western Lake Erie. I feel I did much better at researching for this paper. I collected less information and only kept the information that I knew would be useful in writing the essay. This saved time which allowed me to put more effort into the quality of the writing. For this reason my PaS essay was much better than my AaP. This improvement shows that I have improved enough to earn credit for this course.

First, thank you for your honesty and your bravery in posting this. As a few other posts in this course seem to attest, many people are uncomfortable with posting something potentially negative, or even positive, from their lives and their history and would instead either spurn off the idea and topic of the assignment, or acknowledge a lack of interest and create a false narrative. You did neither.

Before I embarked on taking English 121, writing was something that I thought I knew well. In high school I had to write a two page essay everyday Monday to Thursday and a one page essay on Friday. The essay topics could be on anything I wanted, but at the end of the school week I would have written a total of 9 pages and 36 pages in a month. Now they were not the most elaborate essays, but they had to have an introduction, body, conclusion, and be revised and edited before I turned it in. I am familiar with writing, but the topics in this class taught me a lot more about writing than I ever learned before. My fears going into this class was that I was not going to be able to understand the material being taught, and anything I wrote

Written words have always been my strongpoint, but everyone has weaknesses even in where they are strong. When writing a paper I have a tendency to overuse commas, since some of my English teachers in elementary schools told me that the use of the comma was to demonstrate when a person takes a breath or pause in their speech. In normal speaking I often do that anyhow, which messed me up when it came to writing. I also have been told I often sound too informal in most of my college writing. I am actively working on both problems.

Throughout this course I feel that I have immensely improved my writing skills. Before taking this class, I really disliked writing. I would much rather read than write. I never wanted to take this class, but my parents strongly encouraged me to because they wanted me to be challenged in school. I was terrified to be in a college level class with seniors and a bunch of other people I did not know. I took this class anyways because I did not have any other better options. Of course I still do not like to write, but the skills this class has taught me makes writing so much less stressful. Before taking this class, the longest paper I had written was probably around one to two pages long. In this class, I have written much longer papers, including a six page research essay. My grammar skills have also improved a considerable amount from having to write so frequently. Throughout this course, I have learned the kinds of papers I prefer writing, improved my grammar and organization, and my perceptions of certain topics have changed.

A writing experience that was significant to me was when I was taking AP Language my junior year. We just had finished watching “To Kill A Mockingbird” and our teacher instructed us to write an essay. The topic was the importance of fatherhood and we had to use examples from the movie and real life to support our claim of how fathers are essential to a child's life. The writing experience changed me because I never had a father in my life.

My writing has become increasingly more concise and I have learned how to sustain a logical argument in an organized manner. I have learned to identify different writing styles and make connections that weave things together. Moreover, I am hoping someday that the lessons I learned here in Writing 101 could help me to be successful in getting my Bachelor’s degree. At last, hopefully I can use everything I learned in this course to help me communicate more efficiently and effectively with other people. Before the class start, my objective was: I wanted to be more confident in constructing the grammar of my sentence and paragraph. At this completion of the course, I feel sure that I had the tools needed to further develop my writing skills on my own. I now have the knowledge in order to develop new ways to increment my vocabulary and to understand how to learn

When I signed up for the Writing 101 course, I did not have many expectations. I knew that I would learn the proper way to format sentences, use punctuation, and write/revise essays. I have always had a hard time finding the grammar and proper word usage mistakes in my own essays and I would like to think that this class has helped me to refine my writing skills. Moreover, this class has also helped me to delve deeper into my interests and further examine my family life.