Reflective Letter

This has been a good quarter for me and Writing 101 is a big part of the reason. I came into class knowing how to write a good essay the high school way and now I am able to write a college level essay that even I enjoy reading to myself. After learning the basics, my essay’s got much better as the weeks went by. My first essay wasn’t horrible but I remember having a lot of revision to do. Now, I can write a good quality essay and revise it under a normal time and these essays turn out to be much better because of the skills I adapted to over the course of this quarter.

I think that there is something particular about my essays that I would to draw attention to. The final draft and rough draft of my essays stay somewhat similar. I revise the grammar, spelling and the other mistakes that I make while writing a rough draft. In the end though, both the rough and final draft are nearly the same essay. This can be looked at in two different perspectives. I look at it as; a good writer will freely write a rough draft and after that revise any errors, but if the writer is confident in his paper, then he will keep the essay in the voice that it was originally written in. I think that a common mistake made by many students is when they pick-a-part their rough draft and when they are done putting it back together, it sounds nothing like the voice that they had when they were writing the rough draft. I look at this as a strength that I have in my essays. My essays come out to be in my voice and my voice only.

I have a couple of other strengths that I tend to easily incorporate into my essays. As I recall, my essays have always had a strong introduction. I have a nice first sentence, thesis statement and hook. These three parts are crucial to have in the introductory paragraph. Without them, any essay can start out flat and boring. In my body paragraphs, I have pretty good topic sentences and in my opinion, really good commentary to back them up. I look at this as a strength in all my essays. Finally, good grammar, good word choice and nice sentence structures are some of the aspects that tend to be adequate in my papers. These can be fixed with some work and I am glad to say that they are becoming a smaller problem the more essays I write.

As I have strengths in my essays, I have a couple of weaknesses also. Transitions have always been a problem for. After learning that using high school transition phrases is not acceptable in college, I struggled to find a way for the flow of my essay get from one paragraph to another. I am working on this problem but it has become a bigger problem than I had originally thought it would. Also, having weak transitions takes a toll of the flow of an essay because when you can’t get the rhythm of an essay smoothly from one paragraph to another, it comes out sounding confusing. The reader ends up having to scramble thoughts around trying to make any sense of what is going on in the paper. This is a major problem but lately I have shown some positive progress.

To sum up a whole quarter of this Writing 101 class would take many sheets of paper. I learned everything I needed to know about writing to continue my journey through college and beyond. This class was a bumpy ride for me due to the problems that I had to overcome to write a successful paper. I am personally glad that I took Writing 101 in Highline Community College.