Throughout this course, Ive learned and improved significantly

with my writing. I developed skills I didnt have before coming into this
class. Paper one, two and three were all challenging in different
aspects. A very useful writing technique I learned was that all essays
dont have to follow the five-paragraph essay structure that my high
school taught us to use for almost every assignment we ever did. I
always felt restricted and pressured to follow exactly that format and
now Im able to be open with my own ideas and body structure. In
doing this, I feel my writing sounds less forced and more
understandable. Another significant difference I came across was the
word count. Ive never written an essay that was more then three
pages until coming into ENC 1101. This alone was a big difference that
was hard for me to adapt to and meet the word requirement. I found
myself repeat things I already said in a slightly different way but it
meant the same thing. Also I never wrote four rough drafts before and
then a revision. This allowed me to visually see how Im improving and
that Im noticing the little errors that I could prevent. Without doing
multiple drafts and having the privilege to peer grade, the essay I
would of submitted would lack in many areas. Having students and my
teacher critique my writing in an encouraging but useful way helped
me further understand how I can improve. The one problem that stood
out to me while doing my revision for all three papers was that I dont
go in depth enough about a certain subject matter and left the reader

with questions wondering why or how. Furthermore, I saw the

improvement from the first paper I turned in this semester to the last
essay. It was an outstanding difference and great to know Im
improving after writing for all these years.
Paper Two was by far the most challenging essay and my grade
showed that. My ideas were well developed and I had the right idea,
however, I went into too much background and that wasnt required for
this essay prompt. In doing that, it lost the focus of the assignment and
made the reader wonder why I was sharing that information. I always
thought it was important to give an idea of everything going on in the
introduction and then go into detail about the why he choose to make
the lyrics so different from the video. However, I receive helpful advise
from the reading writing center and the gentlemen informed me that
providing background information about the artist is useful in some
papers but not paper two in particular. Additionally, I struggled with
citing my source throughout my essay and with the work cited page at
the end. I was never properly shown how to do so and I struggled with
following the examples on the Internet. I was able to make
improvements and further learned how to properly cite the sources
needed. Another problem I faced in my final draft four that I changed in
my revision was how much I used the word I. Paper two was a formal
paper and the assignment wanted me to address why the artist had
such a different message in the text and visuals alone. I stated over

and over again I thought and I interpreted and that made me

sound less convincing and too much of my opinion even thought this is
somewhat of my own interpretation of Hoziers song Take Me to
Church. In my revision, I changed my entire sentence order and
structure and that helped clear everything up and follow the
assignment guideline accurately.
Additionally, Paper One was somewhat of a challenge. In the
beginning of my essay, I started off strong with the minor error that I
started my introduction hook sentence off with a fact, which isnt
allowed in a personal narrative. The hook itself should be about me
and set up the tone for the rest of the paper. I didnt have as many
areas I needed to revise like I did in paper two but I had a specific
problem I needed to address that occurred later in my paper. I began
to start talking about how Facebook changed over the years and why
Im a Facebook user now unlike the previous years before. I lost my
story line and began to sound like a saleswomen for Facebook
persuading people to use this beneficial website. I corrected that error
by tying it all back into how it help me in a positive way by not being
allowed to make an account when it was popular and the cool thing
to do. Just like my other papers I had little mistakes that were simple to
correct but if I reread it though one more time, I could of potentially
seen them myself. Its important to do multiple drafts and edits

because this is an excellent way to catch them yourself, making your

writing look cleaner and not rushed.
Lastly, Paper three was a fairly easy essay for me to write. I felt it
was easier because I was very passionate about the topic I chose. The
Mentos advertisement clearly was stereotyping the weight of a woman
and leaving it up to men to decide what they believe to be beautiful.
This isnt how we want our society to go about friendships or even
relationships and thats why I created an anti-advertisement. I tried as
politely as I could to address the girls by description of the
overweight/heavyset girl and petite/skinny girl. I contemplated
changing it to as the taller or shorter girl but then I thought I would get
off track with the topic and it would get confusing as I went along. Like
I said in paper two, I came across a similar problem with citing my
sources throughout the essay. I was able to make this correction in my
revision to help further improve my grade.
In conclusion, this course has taught me plenty of useful
strategies I will remember in all the papers I plan on writing in the near
future. I will recall and use all the critiquing notes I received throughout
these three papers and ask myself those same questions while Im rereading my own papers before submitting them. It was evident that
just with this course itself, I already made an improvement with my
writing. I feel this course has prepared me greatly for the next English
courses I plan on taking during my college career.