Over the past quarter, I have grown as a
writer substantially. I wrote a very similar reflective essay last quarter and
it was completely different than this. Last quarter I talked about how I was
not a good writer and how I struggled through the class, not because I did not
enjoy it but because I could not put all my thoughts together in a logical
sense. But only about 10 weeks later, I am much more confident about my writing
and I think that I am writing a lot better than I did before.
I developed a lot of strengths in both
writing and researching. I never really knew how to write a full-blown research
paper. I did not understand what needed to be done in a research paper or how
to even start one. I chose my identity of upbringing because it is a topic in
which you will never find two answers that are exactly the same. Everyone is
different and therefore had different upbringings. My reasoning behind this
choice was that it gave my paper a lot of flexibility on how I wanted to
approach it.
I have to make improvements on the flow
of my writing; I have gotten comments on my rough draft that say that at a
point in my paper I talked about something that did not have any real
significance. I need to read through my papers better to make sure that what I
am writing makes sense with the flow of the paper and adds valid points to what
I am talking about.
The best feedback I received over the
quarter was from the peer review on our work. Whenever we had to post something
that had to do with our final paper, the peer review responses always gave me
the best idea of what I had to fix in my paper. These comments and my
responding to other students really helped me learn how to revise my work. Even
though when I was doing peer reviews I was not reading my own work, it did help
me with the analysis process. I learned what to look for when reviewing and it
helped me fix a lot of my own mistakes. One of the aspects that I would like to
improve on is reading analysis. During the read and response each week I would
have to go in and re-read the writing two or three times before I got what it
was exactly about. This is a skill I would really like to improve on in the future,
as it will help me be able to analyze pieces better.
Overall, I think this quarter really
helped me improve on my writing skills. I have never really done any research
for this sort of report and that is now a skill that I am happy to have because
it will only benefit me for the rest of my time at Drexel. To put it plainly, I
learned a lot of valuable things about writing over the quarter and they all
helped me become a better writer.
