Reflection Paper

Over the past year I have grown as both a person and a writer. My writing has improved immensely since my first, formal essay in English 111. My biases have changed, my style has improved, and the voice has matured also. Over the course of this past semester my instructor has pushed the limits of what my peers and I were comfortable to do as writers. From arguing a controversial topic such as longevity to presenting our opinions to the class, this semester had no time for slacking. My writing style used to be a “productive” procrastinator effort: I would think of the topic for days, form an argument, and find research that supported my claim. Now, I get right to research, look at both sides of the argument, choose a claim, and develop my paper

One of the major challenges I came across in Dual Enrollment is learning how to write about myself; in every English class before this, we were never to write about ourselves or our experiences, the words “I” or “Me” were taboo. On top of the lack of experience of writing about myself I did not even know myself as well as I thought: I had no idea what I was passionate about. The beauty of seeing my writing progress through this year is seen in the personal development that happened between these papers. When we were assigned the personal narrative at the beginning of English 111 I had no idea what to write about. In English 112, when we were assigned a multi genre that was arguing something, I immediately knew I was going to write about my only passion: fire and rescue. This whole project was me, my experiences, and my passion. I looked at both sides of the argument and tried to remove my bias of being a woman in fire and rescue and found that FDNY may have hired women who did not pass the original physical test, but the physical test itself had impractical tasks that someone with no fire experience would not