The University of Washington is a prestigious school with a big campus and an even bigger student body. For me, as a freshman, this was intimidating. Ten weeks ago I walked into my English class loathing the thought of writing paper after paper. The reading I can deal with, but I’ve always detested writing. To this day I procrastinate writing as long as I can. I always wanted to better my writing but have never had the resources to do so until I got to the English 111 course with professor Alissa Bourbonnais. Through this course I have learned different skills and techniques that will help me with my writing process in the future. Our focus was on the expository outcomes; context, analysis, argument, and revising. Focusing on one outcome per
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In high school I took many honors and AP courses that came with lots and lots of essays and most of which were analytical. Analytical writing is a type of writing that I enjoy more than any other type of writing because I get to find evidence to support my claim about something. Even though I enjoy it I know that it still needs improvement and I’ve been able to learn a little more about doing just that in my English 111 course here at UW. My professor’s feedback along with the feedback of my peers highlights the parts in my paper that I usually do not see the deficiencies in myself. It’s regular for me to analyze something in my writing, but not completely analyze it. By this I mean that I talk about something and then I write down a quote that backs up my thinking after my analysis, but then I do not think of going through the quote to explain why it is important to my claim. I do this time and time again because I do not realize that my audience cannot read my mind on so I need to explain more thoroughly my connections from my writing to my ideas. A huge piece of the writing process that I never paid much attention to until this quarter is revision. I have always looked over my work before turning it in, but in English 111 I learned something that has help me catch so many little mistakes that I would not have found before. This new approach to my revision procedure is reading my paper out loud while doing self revision. I have come to see that skimming and fast reading my papers is not very effective, but when I started to read my papers out loud I noticed a couple of good this come from it. Reading out loud made me slow down and actually take every word I had written into consideration and it gave me time to evaluate my use of punctuation. While reading it I would catch my own mistakes with sentence structure of little typos that I had not
In high school I took many honors and AP courses that came with lots and lots of essays and most of which were analytical. Analytical writing is a type of writing that I enjoy more than any other type of writing because I get to find evidence to support my claim about something. Even though I enjoy it I know that it still needs improvement and I’ve been able to learn a little more about doing just that in my English 111 course here at UW. My professor’s feedback along with the feedback of my peers highlights the parts in my paper that I usually do not see the deficiencies in myself. It’s regular for me to analyze something in my writing, but not completely analyze it. By this I mean that I talk about something and then I write down a quote that backs up my thinking after my analysis, but then I do not think of going through the quote to explain why it is important to my claim. I do this time and time again because I do not realize that my audience cannot read my mind on so I need to explain more thoroughly my connections from my writing to my ideas. A huge piece of the writing process that I never paid much attention to until this quarter is revision. I have always looked over my work before turning it in, but in English 111 I learned something that has help me catch so many little mistakes that I would not have found before. This new approach to my revision procedure is reading my paper out loud while doing self revision. I have come to see that skimming and fast reading my papers is not very effective, but when I started to read my papers out loud I noticed a couple of good this come from it. Reading out loud made me slow down and actually take every word I had written into consideration and it gave me time to evaluate my use of punctuation. While reading it I would catch my own mistakes with sentence structure of little typos that I had not