Final Reflection

 

Final Reflection Over the Semester

               Over this semester I’ve learned a lot of new skills and made lots of improvement to my writing. With this being my first college English class, I’ve taken there were a lot of new challenges and learning opportunities that have had a pretty big impact on my writing and me as person in general.

               The number one skill that I feel I improved on during this first semester is my time management skills. Since this is my first time going back to school in three years, I haven’t really been forced to think about my schedule and make time for important deadlines. Now that I’m back taking multiple classes all with their own different deadlines it forced me to improve on how I managed my time. I used to procrastinate on a lot of different things or only do them when I felt like it, but on a college class schedule that was no longer possible. I had to manage my time better or risk failing my classes and because of that my time management has become a lot better and it’s now a lot easier for me to motivate myself to do what I have to do when I have to do it.

               Some other skills that this class has taught me this semester is revising my writing, formatting my essays correctly, and paying attention to the type of essay I’m writing. For the first response essay we had to write this semester my rough draft wildly missed the mark of what a response is supposed to be. I ended up basically turning what was supposed to be a response to one article into a research paper with five different sources that barely referenced the initial article in the first place. Having my instructor point this out to me during my rough draft helped me tremendously for the rest of the semester because it forced me to pay closer attention to what I was writing and how it needed to be presented. It also helped teach me how to revise my essays when they missed the mark of what they were supposed to be and how they should be structured for the type of essay that I was writing. Also, in high school we never focused that hard on the different types of formatting for essays. We went over them briefly, but every time we actually had to turn in an essay the format we used was never that heavily focused on so this class taught me a lot about MLA formatting and the other types as well.

               Along with learning how to format my essays I also learned a lot about how to make a works citied page. Once again, when I wrote essays in high school the way we formatted our works citied page didn’t matter that much as long as we had one, so this class taught me a lot about how to properly format and organize my sources and how to properly cite them. Overall, the research essay this semester taught me a lot. I’ve never had to write a proposal for an essay before or an annotated bibliography so learning how to write those was a new experience for me that I learned a lot from. The research essay also taught me a lot about finding proper sources and how to cite them within the essay while avoiding plagiarism. In previous research essays I did in high school I usually only had to use one or two sources and the word requirement was only around 500 words or so. Basically, I had never written a proper research essay before so getting to write one in this class helped me out tremendously with learning the proper way to do it and helped improve my writing in general.

               In conclusion, this semester has taught me A LOT. Being out of school for three years and never having to write at this level before left me with a lot of room for improvement and this class definitely helped get to that next level. Whether it was through failures in my rough drafts, new types of assignments like proposals and annotated bibliographies, taking all those inquisitive quizzes throughout the semester, or just having to learn to write at length with higher word count minimums, this class has taught me so many new ways to write and think. I’m happy to say that this class was extremely helpful, and I don’t regret enrolling and I’m very much looking forward to comp two next semester!