As the most physically, mentally and emotional semester of my life comes to a close, it is important to look back at what I did in this class, just as it was important to look ahead at what my goals were in the beginning of the semester. In my ERH 101 class, it was assigned for us to keep and maintain an online blog where we would post all of our papers and reflective essays. Among which was a ‘writer’s development plan’ in which we outlined what we wanted all of which we wanted to improve upon as writers, where I listed some of the things I sought to improve on as a writer. The largest items on my list of improvements were grammar and my ability to efficiently find a method to answer a prompt and in correcting these issues I found others with my writing process that also need to be worked out in later semesters.
Beginning with grammar, I felt like I really have not improved much; however, that was not one of the main goals of the class and was something easily corrected after having a draft reviewed. In fact I think it was even a good thing, in high school grammar seemed like the end all be all of many essays and was often a major component of my grade for an assignment, I was essentially conditioned to believe it was THAT important of a thing that I had to make special note of it. Coming out of my semester, I realize now that grammar is really just a part of cleaning up a draft and be constantly changing as you write. While it is good to know it is something that can be solved by taking your paper to be checked and not be beaten into you class after class. Regardless, grammar is still something I hope to continue to improve on and not rely so much on others to assist me with.
The other primary issue I wrote about, being able to quickly and efficiently make my point, answer a prompt and finish a draft on the other hand is actually an extremely important skill to have, especially as a rat at VMI. In this regard I feel I have improved drastically since high school. This change can be seen from my reflective essays, I never stated that picking my topic was challenging or that actually sitting down and writing out the prompt was the most challenging part of any essay; in fact, one of the most common sentences in my reflections was “The easiest part by far was picking the topic…” Part of this is due to the nature of the ratline of course, never before have I been so pressed for time that I had to get words on paper in a matter of less than an hour and move on to the next assignment, as well as not having the luxury of thinking about essay prompts in my head throughout the day, as well as the nature of the course itself whose rubrics did not restrict our writing as much as High School’s. What really got me out of the rut however was drafting, I used to view drafts as simple busy work and I would often not do them, opting instead to dive right into an essay with everything thought out (often the night before) and be fine. With drafting however, I have a means by which I can hustle my ideas done, add things later, get it looked at and be overall happier with what I hand in because I know it isn’t just the first thing to come to mind; every line has been worked on, thought out and rethought out. I have reorganized whole essays before, noted especially in my discourse community reflection where I stated: “Essentially I had to completely rethink halfway through the writing process how to do this paper…” which allowed me to improve my grade and my confidence in the paper tremendously. Drafting is by far the most major positive change in my writing style and I will no doubt continue it through my cadetship.
As an overall writer I feel I improved, though not exceptionally, but I am happy with how my writing as progressed and adapted under these extreme circumstances. As said above, drafting is my biggest take away from this semester, however I have also started using many prewriting techniques like free writing or making paragraph points for more research orientated essays. I still have much to improve on and there are things I wished I was better at, primarily sourcing. Being at VMI where keeping proper sourcing is crucial, being able to readily find and use quotes and information from outside sources is something I need to master. This can be seen in both the essays where outside sources had to be used (the genre discussion essay and the discourse community essay). I also struggled heavily with time management and had to finish those last few edits a little too close to the time the assignment was due; however, this is primarily due to the ratline and will hopefully not continue as my cadetship goes on. Finally I need to learn how to change my tone when writing. When I reread my assignments I found that I often wrote in my own voice and never actually changed from essay to essay, even from works like the initial more creative piece portrait of a writer to the analytical discourse community essay. I also find it when rereading my research papers from my other classes as well. Being able to change up my writing style and still making it sound natural is a skill I will have to improve upon especially in other classes and write more essays with more varying standards.
All in all I feel I benefitted from ERH 101, I feel that more time could have been spent teaching more research orientated topics, as many of us in the class are humanities students and as such will be writing essays of that type far more then creative pieces or self evaluations. Also all the essays were around a thousand words and did not vary much in terms of overall form and style. I feel I would have benefitted a lot from different styles and lengths of essays even if it meant having two or three more thrown in with the larger ones. On the other hand, the temporally escape of just being able to write during the various stresses of the ratline was a godsend early on. I did not however plan to become a perfect writer this semester, only to improve, so in that regard I am content with how my writing has progressed.