Personal Narrative: My Reflection As A Writer

Writer’s Reflection

As I sit here and ponder over the last semester, I smile remembering what my thoughts were before I started. I was excited thinking about joining this semester, noticing that I had English 111 as one of my courses. This will be a breeze I thought. Writing and I go together hand in hand well, and I bet this will be one of my favorite courses that I’ll ace with flying colors. I’ve always enjoyed writing, but I think that was because I didn’t realize what all goes into writing. I have always been homeschooled and never had to write very many essays, although I loved writing. It all changed when I joined this semester and got to write three entirely different essays. I remember almost being in tears, looking at the highlights, when my first essay came back. I smile now, realizing that I never realized all the small little details that are easily overlooked that goes into writing. I don’t think I could have gotten through this semester without “The Little Sea Gull” handbook and the patience and help of Mrs. Wisdom.

I have always enjoyed writing and the feeling it gives as you empty all your crazy thoughts out onto paper.

I love the feeling you get as you feel your thoughts getting organized, and as you read over the stuff you wrote, noticing things that you never realized you had even thought. I am not one that gets writers block very easily, but when it comes to punctuation, it causes me to screech to a stop. I have always had a hard time with fragments and punctuation. I remember my mom sitting by my desk going over the rules of punctuation mark over and over again. But for some reason it never seemed to click with me as well, as

numbers,

Troyer 2
languages, and facts did. One of my worst punctuation marks, the one that causes me the most problems. Is that sly little punctuation mark people call a comma, that is placed in random sentences at random places. I try to figure out why you would put a punctuation mark like that in
such a random place, but for some reason it just doesn’t enter my mind. I also have major problems, adding periods at the wrong places and creating those annoying things called fragments. I think part of the reason was the fact that I loved writing, but putting punctuation marks in caused me to despair. So I would just randomly stick them into sentences like I would see other people do. Because of this, as I am now entering college where everything is three times harder, and the professors seem to be three times pickier it’s causing me big problems.
Even though there is still a lot of room for improvement, I feel like I have learned the proper use of commas and periods. I have also learned how helpful Microsoft Word is, and have become addicted to using its program for almost all of my writing. Finally, I have learned how much commas do actually matter, and how they don’t just randomly drop into the middle of a sentence somewhere, like I used to think. I feel a lot more confident and hopeful now, as I move onto the next semester because of the things I learned in this semester.
One of my favorite essays that I really enjoyed writing was the TED essay. I love TED talks anyways and watching them was fun! I have also always enjoyed writing research essays as I am fairly good at summarizing. Sometimes when I am not passionate about a subject that I have to write on, it helps a lot when I can look something up and use that as my basis for my speech. Finally, I am passionate about the very subject of love. Although these things really helped my essay, after seeing my score, I was once again discouraged. I realized then that research essays also have a lot of things that I have always overlooked. Such as when you summarize to make sure that you are not plagiarizing, and to make sure that you know where to put citations, and how to format the citing page. As I read over Mrs. Wisdoms comments and sent her a lot of emails. I realized that writing is indeed very complicated, but yet after putting together an essay correctly, it can also be beautiful.
My least favorite essay to write was my personal essay. Although this is probably a lot of people’s favorite, I found that I struggled a lot. I really enjoyed my Asian trip and it was a subject that I was passionate about. But I found that I had too many things to say that I didn’t quite know how to narrow it down to specifics. I also had the problem of being so busy that before I knew it, the deadline had appeared and I had to rush to hand it in. I discovered that grades also really suffer if you do not have a second eye noticing things that you missed.
Over the course of the semester another thing that Mrs. Wisdom got us to do was write private and public journals. I really enjoyed the private journals. One of the reasons that I enjoyed writing my private journal, was the fact that I could write freestyle, without worrying about those troublesome little things like commas and fragments. In the public journals you were supposed to keep track of the things you read and put it to practice, which I discovered was quite fun and very much needed as I am the type of person that sometimes skips my reading projects.
I am very thankful for the peer reviews that we had. If it wouldn’t have been for them I would have probably failed. My peers were always kind and very helpful in pointing out facts that I had missed, such as things like fragments and punctuation errors. I love the fact of having someone proof read my work, as it is truly very helpful to have a second or even a third eye to find things that you had missed.
Another thing I really enjoyed was the blog. Two of the things I enjoyed about it, was the fact that it gave me extra credit, and it always contained such helpful information on the writing assignments. I think that blogs are an awesome way for teachers to interact with students, and for helpful tips and information about the writing assignments.
This semester has truly taught me a lot. I don’t think paper could contain everything that I have learned from this class. To a small, countryside, homeschooled girl, this semester and Mrs Wisdom have truly been a God sent. I feel like I went into this course thinking that I know everything that there is to know in English. Only to find out that, that indeed was not true and that there was more to learn then I could have ever imagined. So at the close of this semester, I feel in a way less confident of my abilities, as I realize everything that there is to learn. But in another way, I also am excited as I realize everything that this semester has taught me, and it makes me wonder what the next semester of English 112 will bring. So, so-long to this semester and this year, and hi-ho to the next. I can’t wait to see what this next year will hold.