Reflection Essay

Over the course of the semester, I feel I have developed a lot as a writer. When I first began this class, I considered myself to be a decent writer. In high school and college, I developed my writing skills, but I always knew there was room for improvement. In fact, one of my high school teachers always said that no matter how good of a writer you were or how long you had been writing, there was always room for improvement. So I entered this class knowing that I could write well, but could learn to write better.

One of the ways I improved upon my writing was to be more careful about mechanics. This is always a tricky part since English is such a complex language. I have never been the best speller, so I am always trying to improve upon my spelling. I was very conscientious to not rely on spell checkers as I have done in the past. I have had too many papers that were marked down because I wrote “their” instead of “there” and spell check did not catch it. The same can be said of other grammar and punctuation issues.

One essay that really helped me improve my writing was the personal essay, where we interviewed someone in the profession we wanted to go into. I chose a teacher from high school that had encouraged me to teach. For this essay, we had to interview the teacher and then write about it. I was nervous about writing this essay, because I had never done anything like this before. I was not sure what questions to ask or how I would translate the recorded interview into a paper. I could not just simply write what she told me. I needed to present it in such away so that it was readable and interesting.

After the interview, I took the recorded material and listened to it. I typed out some of the quotes that I thought were t...

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...he final draft of my paper was much more condensed than the earlier ones and I was happier with it. It was now easier to read. I really learned during the process that I need to write more concisely and effectively. People do not like long, rambling sentences or paragraphs. They also do not like lengthy quotes that take up more than a few lines. They may even skip passages that are overly long. Shorter is always better.

Overall, I think I have met my goal to improve as a writer this semester. I now have a better idea of my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. I know I am much better now than I was. I also know what areas I need to work on in the future. The important thing, though, is to keep writing. That is the only way I will keep improving. Writing is something that you learn by doing, and getting better at by continuing to do it. This is what I intend to do.