Reflection On College Writing

Throughout my journey in English 101 college writing, I have learned a great deal about my approach to writing. When I was younger, I always struggled with writing because I would have so many ideas, but I never knew how to put them on paper. As I grew older and began to write more papers, my writing slowly began to improve. By the time I was in high school, I was writing decent papers and usually making solid B’s. I never thought of myself as an exceptional writer, but I always thought I was average. In general, my English papers were decent, but my strong point were my history papers. In high school, it was my history teacher who helped me become a stronger writer. In my first college writing course, I knew that I would have to work significantly …show more content…
By “it” I mean, the time, money, and financial security. At first I struggled a great deal with trying to figure out what evidence I would use to support my claims that college is in fact worth “it”. After reviewing my essay, I noticed the flaws I made as a writer. My main issue with my first essay was that I drifted away from my thesis. I lost focus in my paper and spoke more about my development as a tennis player rather than why College was worth “it”. For example, my entire fifth page was all about tennis and not why college was worth “it”. I tried to show that tennis was such a large investment for my family, that going to college would be the best way to make the most out of that investment. In order to make this essay much stronger and clear I had to delete an entire page of writing. The reason I drifted off topic was because I was too worried that I would not make the page requirement. Since I was so worried about this, I completely forgot to talk about how having a college degree will help in receiving a steady income. If I had this my paper would have had a much stronger argument and it would have remained on topic. When I revise this essay I need to work on making my argument stronger by having a better ethos. I need to make sure I show my readers that I am credible by using strong evidence and covering my main points. In this essay I made the mistake of not making an outline before writing the paper. I instead wrote out my points on a paper and then began writing. I realized that without an outline my essay struggled and lacked in organization. Even though I struggled with my ethos, I believe my pathos worked well to appeal to the audience’s emotion. When people read my paper, they are able to relate to many of the examples that I used. For example, I said “Living on my own helped me mature and learn simple task like making payment”. In my personal experience,