Reflective Essay

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.