Reflective Tag: This essay goes into the growth that I have had in writing in ERH specifically. I also go discuss my expectation and goals for ERH 102 in Mrs. Smiths class.
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Getting Better
Starting in Kindergarten, people begin to start writing by learning the alphabet. From there, five paragraph essays and book reviews are introduced by the fifth grade. Learning to write continues into Middle School and High School where students are taught research papers, history papers, and other forms such as persuasive essays. Each year involves more writing and continuously help with developing students as writers. For me this road was never easy, but as I have practiced I have seen a great improvement. ERH 101 was not what I expected; however, I learned valuable lessons to help improve my writing such as improvement to my writing process that I believe will be important in the next level of writing.
This past summer I took ERH 101 with Maj. Iddings at Virginia Military Institute’s Summer Transition Program. The class was very different to what I expected. I expected to write persuasive essays and synthesis essays using multiple sorces. My expectation was that I would take a class similar to AP Language and Compositions taught in high school. Instead, we talked and augured about writing and different writing skills. We also talked about discourse communities, which is a community or group of people that have a similar goal or motive. We read articles that the authors wrote regarding literacy, the best process for writing essays, and discourse communities that the writing assignments were regarding writing the assigned papers. At the beginning I struggled with understanding the topics that we wrote about and on how I should answer it. The brainstorming process was a struggle and therefor made beginning to write the paper difficult. My meetings with Maj. Iddings helped with how to better my essays after the initial draft. I learned that reading the essay out loud will help with the grammar errors that I faced. Also, I learned to better organize my papers to help lay out my argument in a more logic way. The class did not meet my prediction, but I believe that it was a class that helped better my writing.
From this summer, I believe my best improvement was my writing process. In ERH 101 we read different articles about the best writing process. The authors would debate between if just writing before editing was better than editing as you write. While in high school, I would take my time as I wrote. After each sentence I would re-read it to make sure it was error free. I wanted every sentence to be perfect before moving on. I believed that if I did it right the first time, the editing process would be easier. On the last essay, I decided to use the articles to help better my writing process. Instead of following my pervious process, I decided to free wrote everything I could about the topic and then decided to go back to edit it. In the end, I received my highest grade on a paper. I believe this process was a better process for me in order to help begin my essays. I also learned to continue writing in an environment that I am comfortable in. At the beginning of the class, I would try and write in the library, which was unlike the environment I was use to writing papers in. For the last essay I decided to result back to the environment I knew that was best for me. This included lying on my bed with Taylor Swift Pandora on, relaxed. This semester I would like to use this process of writing from the beginning while also being comfortable in my environment.
Prior to reading the syllabus for ERH 102 I thought that it would be similar to ERH 101 regarding similar writing prompts. Now after reading the syllabus, I feel that the class will involve more research and have a more of a persuasive sense. I hope to use the new process of writing that I had develop in the other class in order to do well in this class. In this class I hope to better in developing my introductions and conclusions, as well as my transitions between paragraphs. I expect that my writing will get better this semester from more practice. People always say, “Practice makes perfect”. Although my writing will not be perfect, I do believe that with the more I write it will get better. In the future, I will be required to write regarding papers on math methods or on my projects. ERH 102 will help with those later papers by working on transitions, organization and developing a well-rounded argument.
Writing has never been my strong suit; however, each year I see an improvement in my writing. I have high hopes for this next class. The lessons I learned last semester I believe with carry on as I continue to learn new lessons to better my writing ability. My expectation for this class is high and I believe that I can be successful in this class with my hard work ethic and determination.