I feel that the College Writing course benefited my ability as a writer. It increased my confidence about college level academic writing. The style of writing that it introduced was not what was shown in high school and was not something I believe that I could have mastered on my own. The three essays that I wrote for this class really challenged me to improve my writing.
My first essay, really served as an introduction to the new style of academic writing. My focus in this essay was not on implementing others ideas, but on learning how to express my own effectively. The introduction and conclusion of this essay were where I think I demonstrated this new ability most. In those sections I posed questions for the reader to give them things to think about as they are reading the essay and as they consider the message afterwards (Sullivan 1, 4). This strategy of directly speaking to the reader during the essay was something that I had never tried before. The second essay was the most difficult for me of the three. This essay challenged me to truly critically analyze another author’s work. One thing that this essay taught me was the importance of multiple drafts in the writing process. Prior to this essay I did not understand how to take advantage of the revision process to clarify and perfect my ideas. Another thing that I included in this essay that I think were very effective are flash quotation. They seem to make my writing more fluid than one long quotation in the style that I had often used in high school. I went on to use this in my final essay as well. My final essay for this class, on the status of global fossil fuel usage in the world today, was I think, by far my most advanced work of writing ever. Previously I had always had difficulty reaching minimum page limits because I did not properly know how to explain my ideas. This final paper was the first time that I feel I have ever fully analyzed the outside information that I have included in an essay.
For my writing portfolio I have chosen the first and third papers I wrote for the college writing course. The primary reason I chose these essays and did not include the second paper is because the topics of these essays really meant the most to me. That made it easier for me to revise them to a point I was satisfied with. I am also very proud of how well I analyzed and elaborated on the outside information I used in the third paper. An example of this is my analysis of the longer block quote in my third paper; I do not believe I properly understood how to do this prior to this class (Sullivan 2). Another thing I am proud of throughout all my papers is how much more I evaluated the suggestions given to me by my peers and instructor during this class. This is an area that I had never really taken advantage of before. Without this I do not think I would have understood academic writing as well as I now do. Seeing another person’s advice about the mistakes I was making in things such as quote analysis really taught me how to improve this area of my writing in the future.
In conclusion, I had a very positive experience with this class. This course really aided my understanding of certain aspects of writing I had never understood before. I feel that I can now express my ideas far more effectively. In the future my essays will be far stronger due to new writing strategies learned here. I am more confident about writing effectively in future college classes after taking this class.