To be honest, from the beginning of

To be honest, from the beginning of the year, my goal was solely to do whatever necessary to get an A, knowing I’d be satisfied with a B. I was not trying to better my writing or learn about literary devices and writing styles. I wanted to come to class, pay attention, and go home. My goal was to go through the motions. If I learned something in the process, cool, whatever. Initially, I thought the class would be an easy A. I saw myself as a decent writer capable of writing at a college level. I saw your syllabus and thought I would be capable of doing the work. As I looked at the books you required us to read, my interest in the class grew. I started wanting to actually read and learn what you had to teach. For once, I didn’t have a boring English class. I didn’t see uninteresting writing prompts or reading material.
English was never my strong suit in high school, primarily because my writing was empty. It lacked any real substance because I was given prompts I couldn’t relate to or did not have background knowledge on. It wasn’t until I wrote my senior exit that I actually felt good about something I wrote. Still my writing was par. I fell short with delivery.



My writing lacked flair and power to me. Another problem I had with writing was my tendency to kill my writing ideas prematurely. My English teacher junior year told me I was hypercritical of my work. I would trash or erase my ideas if I didn’t like them from the brainstorming stage. This sometimes led to me being narrow-minded in my work and I would lose points in content. This year in English, I learned to stop scrapping ideas by simply keeping everything I thought about while brainstorming. To fix my delivery issue, I would go through sentences while on thesaurus.com and change what I thought were boring words. I learned about sentence types by re-teaching myself how to use them. Varying sentence type and improved content coupled with refined vocabulary made my papers transition smoothly and sound less ordinary.
Now I feel more confident as a writer. I like re-reading papers I wrote because I know it is my best work. Back in high school, I was usually never proud of what I wrote. It wasn’t until this class that I took somewhat of a liking to writing and reading, I enjoyed writing in this class, especially toward the beginning. (not finished)