Reflection Of English 203

As the Fall 2017 term comes to end, I look back on what I have accomplished in this class. English 102 – Composition II was one of the most challenging and toughest class I have taken at UW-Stout, but feel as though it has helped me to improve my writing skills. Even before the semester started the feeling of anxiety had taken over, as writing has never been my strongest skill, but stayed positive and confident I would be successful. Much to my surprise, my instructor, Michael Critchfield quickly addressed that this class would not be easy and amazingly changed my views of writing throughout the entire semester.

In English 111 I have struggled with many assignments over the course of the semester, picking myself up over time from countless mistakes on papers, to procrastinating on basic class work assignments. Before Fall semester, I had no idea what college would be like, or how hard it could be. Things were not the same as high school; it was different to a point where college seemed a lot harder than it was supposed to be. In English 111, I got the chance to meet new students and different professors that have helped guide me to success throughout the semester.

When I started English 203, I was not a good writer. I have never been the best writer. I could not remember all of the rules, where commas go, and how to correctly use a semi-colon. I did not remember not to use the word you in professional writing or whether the period went before or after quotation marks. But, I think this semester in English I have actually started to pick up the correct way to use quotations, commas, how to avoid contractions, and how to avoid banned words. It took some time but, I feel like I have learned more in the past 16 weeks of English than I have in the past 14 years of school. One of the most valuable writing skills I learned was how to write a review on an article and not

English 1100 also taught me to be confident in the papers I write I need to be able to be proud of the work I submit. I learned the more confident I was with each paper I wrote the higher my grade was. When writing about my first topic, “The Mistreatment of Animals in Zoo” I lacked confidence in the subject each paper I wrote I struggled with. I had no idea what to say about the topic or even how to find a reliable source. My professor taught me to pick a subject that you can relate to, that you could debate in person. I did that when I moved onto my second topic “Is College Worth the Cost.” With this topic, I immediately noticed a difference, each paper I wrote I was more confident in and could easily discuss it and discuss my opinion regarding it. Unlike my previous topic that I struggled even writing a one-page paper on discussing it. I also plan on taking away the many things grammar that English 1100 taught me. I learned that one simply cannot proofread enough and that it takes time to write a good paper.

I’ve learned a lot of useful tips from this semester in ENG 201. English has never been my strong suit nor has it been my favorite class. However this college course has changed my point of view of the subject. Prior coming into college I viewed English as a useless class because I’ve already knew the basics: how to talk, read and write essays. Today I view English as an important class. It helped me in other courses that involved writing, such as World Civilization and Communications, because it allowed me to practice my skills. In my world civilization exams I had to write essays. This course helped me write an impactful essay. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that almost all of my exam scores were in the 90s, usually I do poorly in the

Growth, I believe, is inevitable when one is compelled to learn and apply that knowledge which has been presented to them. This semester has proved to be a time of development, change, and substantial growth. During my time in English 101 I have had the chance to really explore new genres of writing such as memoirs, rhetorical analyses, and persuasive essays. In this class I have been able to build upon old writing skills and cultivate new ones; and I have also come to recognize what I like and dislike writing about through the completion of the assignments we were charged with. Through this semester in English 101 I feel as though I have had the opportunity to enhance my ability to apply the rules of rhetoric to my work, convey my thoughts and ideas with greater clarity, and recognize the places where I can improve my work through the revising process.

I have only been attending Cleveland State University for two semesters, and as this course comes to an end I feel like I grown and learned many techniques more than ever. I came to Cleveland State University with only my high school knowledge on how to format an argumentative essay, and throughout this course I now know how to write and format many other papers. Taking English 100 has taught me how to break down and analyze an article, it taught me how to find confidence in my work, and it helped me grow to an even better writer.

Despite the review I got on any of these assignments I have taken away a ton from each piece. English 103 has given me a short measure of time to deliver a wide range of composing pieces, and in addition winding up more educated while creating bits of work. Going into English 103 I was to a great degree positive about my written work capacity and did not understand the huge measure of terms and methods I had never known about. The greatest perspective I am detracting from this class is on terms I had never utilized or heard in English class: ethos, feeling, and logos. These three associated terms were acquainted with me at the earliest reference point of the semester and were immediately installed into my brain and my composition. In class

I learned many new things from English 1102 class. It was not much fun but I learned some interesting things. For my research, I needed a topic that interests me. I first started to search topics from the chemistry field. I could not find any interesting topics then I came across an article that talks about how robots will take our jobs and every one would be jobless. After reading that article, I was really convinced that robots were bad for human society and people should be focusing on improving other fields such as medicine than wasting time and money in inventing a robot, which is one type of luxury and that, will take our jobs. So I chose this topic for my research. For further discussions, I started searching for some more article about robots not good for human society and I found that there was not much about the negative impact of robots in human society other than taking human jobs. So I was stuck but then I found an article that supports the robots. It was a good article and it explains how robots are useful in human society. The Article says that robots will create new jobs and benefit employers, government and disable people. I also found in one article saying that if robots will do our jobs humans can focus on bigger problems like finding cures for diseases, finding solution to prevent natural disasters and many more. Therefore, I decided to support the robot’s positive impact rather than supporting

After completing English 1020 course, I thought I have gained so much skill in writing, reading, and researching that I didn’t need to take any other English course to gain more skills. However, English 3010 course proved me wrong. By taking English 3010 courses, I could realize that, even though I have gained many skills from English 1020 course, it wasn’t enough and I certainly needed to learn more. English 3010 was a course designed to test student’s skill on three major areas: writing, reading, and researching, and more importantly, to help students make improvements in these three areas. Based on the assignment I have completed, the improvements I have made, and by the countless help of the instructor throughout the semester, I was able to gain a lot more skill in English 3010 class on three major areas: writing, reading, and researching.

The course definitely changed the way I approached writing a paper. One day in lecture you quoted Ernest Hemmingway saying, “The first draft of anything is shit.” This changed the way I approached and wrote papers. I used to start papers the night before, barely look over them and making few changes. This course encouraged me to outline, write a rough draft and constantly review then finalization the paper. Peer review before this class I though was pointless because most student hardly pay attention to the paper and usually wrote “good job.” The students in the class actually read my paper and gave honest feedback and ways to improve it. Also to have a teacher read your draft and give feedback with what is wrong and ways to help the quality of the paper helped greatly. This English class was definitely different than high school English.

During this semester, I have learned a great deal about my own writing, and writing in general. One of the main takeaways from this course for me was how to break down the intricate process of writing papers. In addition, I developed viable skills regarding going into more in-depth detail during each step of the writing process. I enjoyed having the freedom to write about a topic that I was able to choose. This allowed me to research and write about something that actually interested me immensely. Having to work with one topic for the entire semester taught me how to find reliable resources and how to pick out the essential research from each article.

Whenever an assignment was given, I used to just write everything that I could think of, similar to a free write. After doing a free write in my scrap notebook, I would then go back and insert examples from the text to further prove my points. After taking this class, I learned that is the incorrect way to write academic papers and that the best way is to make an outline instead so that I can make sure that every point is proven, clear, accurate, and most importantly understandable. I was able to see the improvement of how outlines helped through my first essay. The essay was about picking out an image and explaining its means to the visual context and its impact on culture. My first draft I had learned that I needed to step back and see

This first semester at the University of Akron has flown by. I learned many new writing concepts that helped me become a better writer. English composition was a required class that I had to take in order to get my degree. Although this class was required I still wanted to take this class to become more knowledgeable about writing. Coming into English Composition I was worried about all of the papers and the workload that I would have to complete. I knew that I was going to have to write a lot more than I previously had in highschool, but I was unsure of just how much. The works that I decided to include in my portfolio comprise of my Literacy Narrative, Image Analysis Paper, and essay titled Mayas Hardships based on Maya’s experiences in I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings. I selected these works because I felt that they are the ones that require the most improvement to them. The papers i've chosen show how far I’ve came In English Composition.

From taking this course I have been able to improve many of my weaknesses, but there are still some that I need to work on. Overall I am becoming better at not procrastinating as much as I used to. This class has helped me to learn to take the little steps along the way because then there will not be as much work to do towards the end. This has also made me realize that the final product of my writing will turn out better because it will have had more time to develop, which means that there would have been more opportunities to proofread. I think by learning many styles of writing, such as paraphrasing, summarizing, analyzing, and researching; it has enabled me to be able to write more broadly. By knowing how to correctly use all of these kinds of writing styles, it will help me in the future for other classes because I will have the knowledge that I need to write these types of papers. I still procrastinate sometimes, but not as much as I used to. I will be able to improve on this as time goes along because I will become more motivated by seeing the end result, which usually would be better grades.