My Year as a College Student
Starting as a freshly minted adult in English 101, I realized my writing skills were subpar. My grades were not what they once were and my writing skills were not enough to skim by anymore. Throughout my year of education, I learned, through failure after failure, the concepts of writing that my professor had emplaced in the core curricula of the class. In my first semester, I learned the basics of college level writing. In the second I took my writing to the next level, to practice in Argumentative, research, and exploratory essays we focused our efforts into a cumulative study into higher education. Each section of this study providing a starkly different learning opportunity while also building off each other.
The first semester of English was a wake-up call. With a paper written on Literary sponsors, media presentations, discourse communities, and reflection, the learning curve was beyond me. Somewhat due to luck I was able to pass the class by just doing the essays, and turning something in, even if it was a slapped together essay that would probably fail a fourth grade English SOL. This got me through English 101, as I came into English 102 I was worried about my grades(move down). With a dedication to fix my issues from last quarter I set forth on my new journey through my last semester of writing intensive ERH courses. In the last semester, I had noted several weaknesses that lead up to my failures as a writer. These included grammatical errors, lack of sentence structure, and poor transitions. These were constant faults in every single one of my papers, every single grade I received from my professor included a ten to twenty-point deduction in these areas. With a renewed effort, I set forth into the new semester to fix these issues.
The first assignment of the new semester was an exploratory essay. This was a new concept for me and I struggled greatly with it. My first draft did not follow the assignment and was closer to a research essay. I revised it and turned it in. Upon return I made the discovery that I had not done enough while revising it and my professor treated it as an off-topic essay. This was a shock to me, thankfully it was also the case with several my classmates. The professor allowed us to revise our papers, which had the potential to save my grade. Before I began my revisions, I scheduled a conference with my instructor. After reviewing her critique of my paper, I began to understand where I had drifted off. She referenced me to the course textbook which contained a step by step instruction, and a few examples of good essays. Using these as a reference I brought bring my paper back on topic and picked my grade up quite a bit. This brought me to one of my main conclusions from the semester, follow the book. Contained in the textbook are numerus examples and discussions on how to write various essays. This gives you a bracket to work directly off of, which makes completion of an organized essay much easier.
Our next assignment was an argumentative essay. The argumentative essay taught me to focus on my thesis. This was a problem I had been semi aware of in the past but it had never really been brought to my attention. In this essay, we had to develop an argument and support it, a fairly easy task. After reviewing my first draft I determined that I hadn’t even put a thesis statement in the paper( find specific paper citation). When I noticed this I went back and checked my previous paper and found the same thing, I had been routinely neglecting my thesis statements and just diving into the meat of the paper. I consulted the textbook for help remedying this. By the time I had finished the paper I had formed a solid thesis for the paper and had placed it perfectly. Since then I have tried to maintain a conscious effort when forming my thesis, this has helped but I still find it difficult to create the perfect one every time.
Our main essay was a research essay; this was backed by our numerus other assignments of the year. Combined with an annotated bibliography, an exploratory essay, and several revisions of our thesis statement we were ready to take on the two thousand word paper. Using my researched sources, I began compiling my essay. Drawing the format from the textbook I created an organized and to the point essay. The only problem with this essay was keeping a coherent argument over so many words. My sources and arguments were really only capable of carrying me through half of what was required. This caused the major flaw in my essay. In an effort to boost my word count I added many sections that were not needed and crammed words in places that were harmful to my paper. This caused my paper to quickly lose focus, created poor sentence structure, and lead to poor grammar.
The main point of these papers was to teach the format of higher level writing and how to conduct and support an argument. These were not my greatest weaknesses, but I was able to improve on my weak spots through constant practice and effort. The repetitive writing of papers gave me the constant practice I needed to improve. Though my year of practice has not made me a perfect writer, far from it in fact, it has improved my abilities to communicate as a writer immensely, which I believe is the main point of the course.