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Moriah Pfeiffer
Mrs. Lisa Luton
English 101
9 December 2016
Reflection
Writing is an escape from the real world and sometimes its about as stressful as deciding
where to go to college. I have come to learn that writing will help you grow not only as a student,
but as a person. This semester writing has helped me escape the reality of the world around me, it
has let me submerge myself in research and my own world. My growth as a writer this semester
has gone from, you have way too many thoughts out of place to everything flows in a logical
cohesive way. Lets take a look from the beginning to now.
The very first paper we did was a literary analysis essay. Before writing this essay I
dreaded writing , I played with the dogs for about 30 mins, went out on the back screened-in
porch and stared at the lake for a good hour. When it was about 1:30 p.m. I finally dragged my
butt in the house and grabbed my laptop. When I started writing I couldnt stop, my ideas were
just pouring out. That is how this essay got written, by hours of dragging through the house until
my ideas were formed and finally got onto my paper. Throughout this essay I kept in mind that
the assignment told us to use textual evidence. One of my biggest struggles was procrastination. I
would start the paper and then move on to something else. Once I got into a grove I finished the
paper within two days. The greatest strength I had in this paper was pulling textual evidence to
back up my ideas. My next essay although I did not procrastinate I found another hurdle that I
needed to cross.

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The next paper that was written was a personal narrative. When we were given the
prompts to write this essay I was so angry at myself for not knowing right off of the bat which
prompt I would choose. As I picked three prompts to write one paragraph over I kept going back
and perfecting the paragraph over my childhood into adulthood, this is when I knew it was the
prompt for me. When writing this prompt I kept going between two ideas. I finally settled on
writing about the week away from my parents and a single plane ride. Throughout this essay I
was trying really hard to get my thoughts in a chronological order. The beginning was rough for
me, I was so angry at myself. This just taught me to take a breath and step back. For when I did
that my paper wrote itself, with a little help from me. The thing that surprised me most in this
paper was the way I fit all the details in without it feeling like a giant chunk of information was
missing. I usually write too many unnecessary details however, in this paper I wrote just the right
amount of detail. This made the paper easier to write and my ideas just flowed rather than me
thinking if I need to add more detail to get my point across. My greatest weakness in this paper
was writing a logical paper. I struggled in trying to get my ideas to flow cohesively. While
struggling with this I just started writing things in the event that they occurred, and my paper
seemed to flow after I stopped overthinking. The next essay tested another weakness that I had
no idea I would have to overcome.
Now it was time to write a rhetorical analysis essay. When the class was told to write
about the two presidential candidates I was extremely nervous. When writing this essay I would
write what I was thinking and then delete the sentence because it was too biased towards another
candidate. I was very frustrated while writing this paper because I couldnt say something about
one candidate without being biased towards another one. I would rewrite the same sentence six

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or seven times before getting a sentence without being for one candidate too much. I ended up
deleting my whole paper three pages in because I felt I needed to restart this paper with a
different mindset. Once I cleared my mind of all the media about a certain candidate I really
looked at what each were saying. Once I did this my paper just started writing itself. The hardest
part throughout this essay for me was writing an unbiased paper. I had no idea when starting this
essay that I would struggle as a writer. My weakness in this essay was being way to biased
towards another candidate. I would find something one candidate would say and then I would
automatically sway towards the other candidate. Being biased towards someone is a hard thing to
overcome. My greatest strength in this essay was to point out the different ethical appeals each
candidate used. The paper written was a research paper, this was by far one of the easier essays
for me to write.
The very last paper we wrote this semester was a research paper. This paper in the
beginning for me was hard to come up with a question to research. I was trying to find a question
that I had passion about, something that meant a great deal to me. I was racking my brain for
ideas. Then I started to stare off into space and an idea came to me, suicide. A few years ago my
Grandfather committed suicide and I was left with a question lingering in my head, Why? So
there is the question I wanted to research. Why do people commit suicide? This research paper
was one of the easier papers I have written, but I did run into a few minor bumps along the way.
Research is full of statistics and facts, putting all of that into a paragraph without taking the
original author's wording was tough. My greatest strength in this essay was getting all of my
ideas and placing them in a logical order.

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I have grown so much as a writer this semester. It has helped me become a more mature
and thoughtful writer. I have gotten over some weakness that have always been there and
discovered some new ones as well. The thing that surprised me most this semester was seeing all
of my strengths. I never knew I had so much room to grow as a writer. This semester taught me
that there is always room for growth.