Throughout the course of this semester, I have learned a lot from being in this class. I have become a better writer, at least in my eyes. The different writing assignments were helpful in using research and asking questions when I was stuck. It took a while to grasp the concept of it, but when I did it became a useful tool.
One of the most helpful things that I learned from this semester of English was that having your peers read over your rough draft can improve the result of your paper. Viewing your paper with the second and third eyes can reduce the errors in the paper. For example, when I allowed my peers to review a copy of my paper, they were able to find what I missed when reviewing the paper. Peer review can also be a place to learn. Your peers might be more conscious about a subject than you are.
I also learned an important skill in this semester that I can use not only in essay writing but also in my daily activities. When we wrote the weekly module, I already had the skills to organize my thoughts. For example, write a thesis outline. I have always thought that writing an essay was about the whatever-comes-to-mind process, but in this class, I learned that before I can write an interesting essay, I have to make an outline first. True enough, my first attempt to make an outline was a disaster. It was harder than it seemed to be, but with limitless patience and a ton of practice, I am now able to organize my thoughts first, put them into writing, and write a decent legible essay.
Another thing that I learned over the semester and from revising my paper is that I wasn’t quoting some of the content of the essay incorrectly. Even though the content consisted of facts from online sources, the sentences should be still cited or put in quotations. For example, in paragraph six of my essay, “The one major difference the study found was that conventional animal products were more likely to be contaminated with pathogens that were resistant to three or more antibiotics — for chicken and pork, conventional samples were 33 percent more at risk.” This was good factual information provided to support the topic of the paragraph, but without crediting or putting in quotations, this is considered plagiarism. At the beginning of the semester, I was under the impression that only direct words from the author should be put in quotation marks. As the semester progressed, I have learned that this is not the only time quotations should be used. I now understand when to include quotations and how to properly cite direct quotes or sources. By learning how to properly cite my sources, it has made incorporating quotes in my writing a lot easier.
Each writer has their strengths and weaknesses. Usually, my strengths are outweighed by my weaknesses. Things I really struggle with are things like grammar and MLA format so when it comes time to write I could have great content that is really interesting but my grade is squashed by sentence fragments and mechanical errors. What I learned from my writing this semester and with a little more practice I could overcome all of those issues and could really develop my writing. In most of my papers, I mainly focus on the content. I always have an interesting topic as soon as a project is assigned, which could also be one of my flaws. If I sat and thought about the assignments a little longer, maybe I could have found better topics or subjects for some of my essays, especially the research paper.
After all the material that I’ve come in content with this semester, whether positive or negative, can be used in the future to help better my writing skills. In my future papers, I plan to use negative feedback to improve the errors that have been brought to my attention, such as plagiarism and elaborating on my topics. These are factors that are easily corrected and deciding factors between a mediocre paper and an excellent paper. Now that I have learned what it takes to have a successful paper, I can accelerate my writing skills to a higher level.
As a writer, I did develop. Throughout this semester, I have felt myself feeling more confident and comfortable as well as much better at seeing and picking up errors. When doing the revisions on the papers Prof. Professor corrections help me see what I did wrong, and keep me from making the error over and over again. Which I feel is a big issue with me, I make about five or ten of the same grammatical errors over and over because I’m not sure what the correct way is. I think after the next semester when I take my next English class I will be getting to the point of a good writer.
