Semester Reflection

Which of your pieces was the most challenging to write? Give three reasons and explain.

The pieces that were the most challenging to write was the short story because I am not creative. First of all, I couldn’t come up with a good idea for my short story. Then, when I finally came up with a good idea, I was not able to put it down into words. So, I finally came up with another idea. Another reason why it was challenging to write was that after I finally wrote down my entire story, I was unsure about my plot and I kept changing things. I worried whether my twist was actually a twist an I wondered whether it was actually good. I was not confident and that was the main reason why it was hard to write. Lastly, it was hard to write because I didn’t know how to develop my characters. How would I justify what each character did, and how was I to portray them? It was hard to decide. 

Which of your pieces was the most enjoyable to write? Give three reasons and explain.

I think the descriptive essay was definitely the most enjoyable to write mainly because I had a clear idea of what I wanted to write about a vivid memory about it. Because I had an entire story in my head, it was easy to put down into words and add some description to what I already had a clear image of. Another reason why it was enjoyable to write was because it’s something I’ve never challenged myself with in English. It was outside my comfort zone because I’ve never purposefully tried to make my writing descriptive and use figurative language, which was fun to try to incorporate. Lastly, I think it was enjoyable because choosing a childhood memory to write about was extremely fun. I had many ideas to choose from which was part of what made this enjoyable. 

What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer? Explain.

I think some of my strengths are how I am able to be descriptive in my writing so that I can paint the scene well for the reader. I also think that I do well in pacing my stories to keep the reader’s attention, but also slowing down at the right moments so that I can have an expanded moment. Some of my weaknesses as a writer is that I am unable to come up with good ideas quickly (I’m not very creative) and it takes me some time to come up with one that I’m actually interested in writing about. I also find that if I’m not interested in what I’m writing about, I am unable to write well, which can lead to problems in the real world. 

What have you done to develop your strengths and minimize your weaknesses as a writer? How successful do you feel you have been? Explain.

To develop my strengths, I feel like I’ve tried to develop my strengths by being more conscious about incorporating my strengths into all my writing. I try to be descriptive in writing, no matter what the prompt is about, and if it’s anything with a narrative, I think through how I am going to pace things. So far, I believe been quite successful because I’ve been able to grow as a writer this semester by doing this. In order to minimize my weaknesses, I feel like this class has really helped. To help me develop my skills as a writer, making me write about things I didn’t care about helped me improve my skills in brainstorming and expanding my creativity. I don’t think I was very successful, but taking conscious steps to brainstorm for things that I didn’t really care about was a success to me. 

What kind of future career or field of study are you considering? What kinds of writing might be important in this career or field? Explain, giving specific examples.

A future field of study I’m considering is social science. I think writing can be important in this field through research papers about more narrow topics, writing reports, and even through writing emails and letters. In a future career in social science, writing emails and communicating with others is probably very important. However, writing is important in all aspects of life. 

What advice would you offer the College Writing teachers as they plan this unit for next year? What might be some additional pieces of writing to add and why? How was the timing and pacing? Did you receive enough feedback? Didyou receive enough instruction and input so you knew how to do each assignment? You can make specific comments about specific assignments here. What did you like or not like and why? What would make this unit more student-friendly, provide more learning, or make it more interesting? Explain.

To any future College Writing teachers, I’d say that giving us a lot of time to work was really helpful. However, maybe we could do more lessons about how to write properly rather than allowing us to just go for it. I think an additional piece of writing to add could be a science fiction/fantasy unit, since it’s really popular among teens right now and could be interesting to talk about and write about. I think the timing was good because we were given a lot of time to work on our writing to perfect it. I also think I received enough feedback, with all the opportunities for peer feedback and the teacher always being open to questions. The instructions were also very clear and simple. I definitely liked the class because while it was chill, it was also an opportunity to allow me to do things outside of my comfort zone. To make the class more student friendly and provide more learning, it might be nice for us to read more examples and actually discuss them as a class rather than discussing them in a document.