Portfolio: Reflective Letter: Reflection on a Quarter of College Writing

----I came into school at the beginning of the quarter thinking to myself “I always stink at history, so I’m going to have to try extra hard at that. The good news is, I have writing with it, and writing is always easy.” I don’t think I could have been any more wrong without thinking both classes were going to be easy. The writing class really threw me off; I expected it to be easy because I’ve been writing for years. Throughout the quarter I realized I had much to learn about writing and now I realize that, while I’m not done learning, I am much improved. This class gave me a bit more perspective on, not just my strengths and weaknesses as a writer and how to improve on them, but on writing in general too.
----I have improved my writing from this course, but I still have my weaknesses. At the beginning of the course, the first essay, I didn’t clearly “signpost.” One example from this is “The original and most apparent cause for the revolution was the violence that erupted between the Indians and the colonists but was preventable by Berkeley” from my first essay; this was both grammatically confusing and horrible at controlling that paragraph. However, I improved upon it in my second essay with most of my topic sentences doing a fair job of controlling the paragraphs. Another thing I am bad at is grammar and conventions, however, I have not improved much on that so I cannot give any specific examples, other than that I’m still not always clear when I need to use semi-colons, and I have only a vague idea how to use colons. My paragraph structure has improved over the course, if not my sentence structure.
----I believe that one of my strengths could be my use of vocabulary. I believe that I mainly use big words, such as extrapolate, when they fit perfectly. However, I do not simply pepper my paper with difficult words simply for the sake of doing so. This lends voice to my papers, and was perhaps helped by thinking of Craig saying “quit making more work for yourself”. Another thing I think I did well with is my argument development. In both papers I stated my argument, then state the reasons, then stated the supporting details for each of these reasons. While I will say that in my first one I had to stick with an argument that I would have abandoned if I had had time to research another argument, I believe that I managed to argue that well. I also thought that I argued my second essay, creating a respectable persona, and then finding reasons and a thought development pattern that would fit said persona, including details that would be seen by such a figure. I believe the course book helped a small amount with this.
----I used to think of writing as simply a form of communication, limited in some ways, but excelling in others. Now I think of it as much more than that, it is a way of graphically organizing your thoughts. You can set them down on a piece of paper, and in doing so, you have to figure exactly what your argument is, analyze it, and refine it. This is useful because it always you to create a cohesive argument, and helps you find flaws in it. It is important for writing to have an ulterior motive for me because essays are something that I would rarely write if it weren’t for school.
---- Essentially, it has been a productive quarter. I have learned much more about what skills I do and don’t have as a writer. Once I learned these skills and deficiencies, I worked to improve them. While I was doing these things, I also managed to gain more a more holistic view of writing. However, I have only managed to do these things with a large amount of work and an even larger amount of stress.