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Reflective Letter:
First, I want to say the class has helped my writing improve thanks to Professor, Olivia Wood. She has been a great professor and has always helped us with questions, and when our writing wasn’t at our best. She was always clear about the work that needed to be done. Also, the overall class was very comfortable and fun because I was comfortable sharing my ideas with everyone. This semester we had many assignments that I believe I did well on. I always tried to write my best as our professor would help us throughout the process of a paper or just any assignment. I believe my writing skills in research papers and arguments have improved. At the beginning of this semester, I reflected on my writing and I felt confident in it, but APA format changed my mind between the semester. Although at first, I was bad with APA format, Professor Wood, made it understanding for us and helped me learn to do it correctly.
Although I did learn a lot about my own writing skills and how to help improve them, I know there are still things I need to perfect or work on. I need to be better at writing a paper where I only include the main points and not unnecessary content. Also, I need to get better at writing a conclusion, I know they sound easy but I want to write a conclusion where I don’t have to repeat the whole paper and where I can leave the reader with some good information. Something else I want to learn about more or get better on is, separating paragraphs. Sometimes I get carried on and I begin to write extremely unnecessary long paragraphs. One last thing I want to further develop my vocabulary and word choice. I believe I used good word choice in my papers, but I know I can do better so I could sound more sophisticated.
Throughout this course, I felt like I further developed my argumentative skills and my research skills. Although argumentative papers have always been my favorite, research papers have not. I believe I got better at writing research papers. I was able to find reliable sources and implements them all into my writing. I also got better at analyzing my own writing. For example, when we would do our weekly rhetorical devices, I did very well in all of them. I was able to create a good analysis of my example roving that it makes sense to be labeled as that specific rhetoric. I also got better at analyzing in general, for example in my research paper I was able to pull out good evidence in order for a good analysis so the reader could better understand the idea of the paper.
Adding on, I have also got better at analyzing data. When we did the collecting data mini project about ourselves and something we do every day, I was able to analyze my data in order to come to a conclusion. My organization skills have also improved through this assignment because I created a well-organized table so that my data would be clear to the reader. I analyzed it well by explaining little details and expanding ideas on them. Another assignment that helped me was the imaginary interview because it helped me think from other people’s shoes and what others would think. This assignment also helped me search for good evidence in order to help support my main idea for my research paper. One more assignment that helped me so much for my final paper was the annotated bibliography, that was my second time writing an annotated bibliography and I honestly did way better than I expected. This assignment helped me search for strong evidence as well as build an analysis so that I could further use it in my paper.
Let’s not forget about paper one, “This I no longer believe”. This paper helped me personally because I realized something I never really thought about. I realized that there are more things I used to believe in before that I don’t any more other than Santa Clause, or the tooth fairy. I was able to get personal and show emotion as well as imagery in this paper about a story that has impacted my life greatly. This paper definitely helped me and was a great first assignment to start with for this course because it was simple to write for someone who is just a freshman.
Overall this class has helped me so much with my writing and I am excited to get better throughout the years. I love that this class helped me improve some skills I was ashamed of. I am grateful for Professor Wood because she has helped all of us and pushed us to do better even in situations we were nervous about presenting. WhenI found out we had to present and speak in front of a class about the research we have done, I was so nervous. I am very outgoing and don’t mind speaking out loud, but I just felt more nervous because it would be my first time presenting in front of a college class. I appreciate our professor because she made us feel comfortable with presenting because she was always interested in our ideas. Lastly, This was my favorite class for many reasons, my weak writing skills got better, I felt confident and proud in my writing, and I went out of my comfort zone by presenting. I am thankful for this course, my classmates, and overall grateful that I had such a great professor.
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Question (If you had the freedom to write about whatever you wanted, in whatever form you wanted, what would you do? Why is this your dream piece of writing?:
If I had the freedom to write about whatever I wanted, I would’ve written an argumentative essay because I feel I’m good at finding strong evidence to support an argument. I would not change the length because I actually don’t mind writing 6-page papers because I love to write a lot and really analyze. I also would not change my writing because I feel that the way I write works for me. I wouldn’t change any of the assignments they were all fun and I would not change the research paper. I wouldn’t change the research paper for the main reason that I wrote about a topic that interests me a lot and I learned a lot more than I knew during the process. My dream piece would be writing about my life because I feel that everyone has different stories and it’s interesting to know other people’s stories because sometimes people judge without knowing what someone has been through. The first paper definitely allowed me to do this a little because I wrote about one important time in my life. Overall all the assignments were well organized and interesting to me.
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