Reflective Letter

Writing has never been my best subject because I felt I was never good at it, so I was excited starting Writing 101. I knew that producing college level work will be lot more useful than producing high school work. I have put together a portfolio together that contains my work over this quarter. These pieces of work show my weaknesses, strengths, and improvements. Included is my first essay “Mistreatment of Indians,” my second essay “Story of a Georgia Loyalist” and my in-class final exam. My Writing Philosophy over the years was when writing an essay; I would just type it up one time and turn it in without writing multiple drafts. Taking this class I learned that it is very important to write multiple drafts because that is the only way to improve our writing and get better at it. English, being my second language made it hard for me to produce well-written essays, but from practicing and receiving feedback from my classmates and teacher, I have improved on my writing.

I quickly learned that my Writing Philosophy was useless after writing my first draft on my essay “Mistreatment of Indians.” I received a lot of good and bad feedback from my classmates and teacher. I realized that I needed to make many changes to my essay and I ended up re-writing the whole thing. In my opinion my final draft was written a lot better than what I have written the first time. Even though I received a score that I thought could have been better, I learned that my strength was my voice being well captured when I write. I have good ideas, but one of my weaknesses is that I need to work on putting my information into organized paragraphs that make sense when the reader is reading. Also, when I first wrote my first essay, my hook didn’t make all that sense with the rest of my paragraphs. When I re-wrote the essay I made sure that the paragraphs in the body supported the hook. For example, the hook for my essay is, “Colonists mistreated Native Americans because the Virginian government wanted full control over the Native American’s property and colonists wanted to ensure their safety.” I decided to keep this hook the same and when I re-read the essay, I saw a big difference. The essay that I re-wrote supported the hook a lot more.

As I made changes to the final draft of my first essay I knew what I needed to work on for my second essay “Story of a Georgia Loyalist.” This essay was a lot easier for me to write personally because it included some creative writing. The most difficult part of writing the essay was searching for information, other than that I didn’t have many difficulties. Writing this essay I struggled finding more information to help the reader really understand what I am writing about. My final score was better than my first score on the first essay, which proves that I have improved on my writing. I still need to work on organizing my thoughts so the essay is clear. There were some things that I included in the essay that were not that relevant, so I need to make sure that when I am writing I am including things that are only relevant to the essay. For example, in my essay I found two sentences that were not so relevant so I went ahead and erased them. I know that I will keep improving on my writing because I specifically know my strengths and weaknesses.

Starting this class I knew I was not a good writer. After producing these essays I feel more confident in my work and see a big improvement. As instructor Craig McKenney says, “no one is a bad writer” and to me that is true. I may have not been the best writer in the class, but I am happy with the growth that I have made. I learned so much that I know I probably wouldn’t have been taught in high school. This class was a great experience for me and I hope that my portfolio reflects my experience.