My Experience of Learning Writing and Grammar

Overall during this class, I thought I learned a lot about writing and grammar. Before this class, I would’ve dreaded writing a two-page paper, but now I don’t see it as that big of a deal because I’ve written so much. Not only have I learned many things about writing, but I’ve also learned tons of skills about time management and working hard.

The topic selection, for me, was what kept me interested in this class. Oftentimes in the past when writing papers we would always be given small choices on what to write about. In this class, we were completely free to choose what we wanted to write about. One of my papers was about my faith. As I wrote my paper I was learning about one of the most important things in my life. That paper wasn’t easy to write, but because I was so interested in what I was writing about it didn’t seem painful at all. 

Time management wasn’t just ok for me in this class. It has always been hard for me to work in class with all my friends, but it’s especially hard for me to write papers around other people. When I go home and just have an hour to sit down and write by myself, that’s when I easily get the most done because I don’t have distractions. It helped me use my class time by not having any of my friends on this side of the class. All my friends came to school the other day so instead of talking to them during class time I was a little more productive. 

Peer response to me felt like it was a little backward. I am a pretty creative dude and don’t have a problem developing my thoughts and putting them into words. When doing peer response we were always told to look at the ideas in the paper and not the grammar. My ideas were always pretty good and pretty well developed; most of the time what I needed help on was my grammar. That made peer response unhelpful many times throughout the class. I got around the problem by having to edit my papers by myself a little more than most people.

One of the things I did struggle with was the length of my essays. When starting out on writing my essay I would look at my research or what I was writing about and would think, “no way I get four pages about this.” In the end, I would always reach the required amount but it was always a scramble at the end. My descriptive paper is the most guilty of working hard just to get it long enough. While writing that paper I tried to lengthen the end, but it still wasn’t long enough. I had to go back through the paper and expand on topics and even had to add objects to describe that I hadn’t thought of before. 

My effort and motivation I thought were pretty good during this class. I haven’t started to experience senioritis yet, though I know it’s coming. I have never been a procrastinator so getting started on papers never created a challenge. As mentioned up above my interest in the topics is really what made this class easy. 

I felt that I learned a lot about the writing process from this class. I have always been a pretty good writer, so before I took this class I could pretty much always rely on my rough draft to be good. My rough drafts for this class were still good, but I realized I needed to take the editing stage more seriously. Having always had the ability to turn in my rough draft as my final paper, I never truly learned how to edit. One of the biggest things I learned from this class is how the editing process can sometimes be just as important as the rough draft. 

In the future, I think I am prepared to write college-level essays. As I did in this class I think I will retain the ability to develop my ideas well, I’ll just need someone to look for grammar.