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Throughout my academic career writing has been my weakest subject for a variety of different reasons. Even after taking ERH-101 here at VMI I don’t feel like I’ve developed any new skills regarding what to address in my writing which along with other things worry me coming into ERH-102. My concerns entering the next level of writing course stem from the fact that I’m not any stronger of a writer than I was in high school. This is due to my lack of interest in the subject and my ERH-101 teacher being impersonal and not very helpful in teaching us writing strategies. Since I learned little to nothing about what to address in my writing last semester I’m a little afraid of what is to come in ERH-102.
As mentioned, I didn’t really learn anything new about addressing specific information in my essays throughout English Writing and Rhetoric 101. The only thing I specifically addressed in level one English papers was different points made by authors of articles we read. Last semester we wrote one paper where we had to address the opinions of authors and use their opinions to support our own theses. Other than that I guess attempted to address points and topics that I knew my teacher would be interested in. I would briefly mentioned a topic that I knew would catch his attention based on what he told us about himself at the beginning of the semester. These were simple attempts at making my essay a little more enjoyable for him to read and hopefully have a positive impact on my grade. However, I learned these two strategies in high school leaving me with the reality that I didn’t learn much in ERH-101. This is my greatest concern now that I’m moving into a higher level English course where expectations are higher yet my skills remain unchanged since high school.
The demand for well-developed essays with little to no room for error scares me coming into ERH-102 because I don’t feel that I’ve developed college level writing skills yet. My English class last semester didn’t teach me any new strategies as a writer and my teacher gave minimal advice on how I could improve. Therefore, I still have a hard time with things such as the writing process and interpreting feedback. All through high school my teachers have all tried to teach me the best way to develop a paper. They taught about the process of laying out ideas, creating an outline, drafting, and revising. In the past I’ve procrastinated or just not had enough time to go through the whole process of gathering my thoughts or creating an outline so I would just skip straight to the drafting phase. That was a bad habit I was hoping to break last semester but I wasn’t able to since the ratline and work from other classes took up a lot of my time. Besides my approach to writing papers, another thing that has me worried moving into English 102 is that I have a hard time revising my papers. Since I usually had to meet some sort of deadline I’d try to make my first draft as good as possible to avoid as much of the revising phase as I could. This gave rise to two problems last semester in particular: first being how inefficient that strategy was, second being that I wouldn’t get very much constructive feedback from peer reviews. I would submit a rough draft to my peers to be revised but I’d rarely get any feedback on how I could improve my paper as a whole. They would return my paper to me with a bunch of highlighted sentences that contained grammatical mistakes or missing punctuation which I usually caught myself anyway. My point is that peer reviews were an insufficient strategy for revising my papers and I wish I could have gotten some sort of feedback from my teacher before handing in my final draft. The last thing that has me worried about English 102 that I forgot to mention earlier is the work load. This semester I’m taking 18.5 credit hours and from what I’ve seen so far, four of those classes are going to be very time consuming outside of the classroom. This has me worried about having enough time to produce quality work for this class at least earning myself a B.
To conclude, my experience so far in college writing courses has been mediocre for teaching me ways to become a better writer which along with a couple other things has me worried about moving into this higher level course. My first exposure to a college writing course consisted of: coming to class, doing some assignment related to our paper, then leaving with little to no interaction with the professor. Some students liked this style of teaching but I was not one of them. I prefer a class where the teacher interacts with the students and give personal feedback on how to improve their writing. The lack of development last semester paired with increasing expectations are the main things that scare me about ERH-102. Even though I may be faced with these challenges I feel that with a little bit of hard work and dedication I should be able to achieve my goal of receiving a B in this class.