Francesca Ciampi Final Reflection English 1101 has been amazing for me mostly because I have never progressed

this fast in my writing in an English course before. When the semester began my writing was full of fluff, had no elaboration and I had no idea how to productively peer review a paper. Now that it is the end of the semester, I am confident in the previously listed skills and I am ready to move on to English 1102 to see what more I can learn. The most important skill Ive practiced and perfected this semester is writing with a purpose. The word purpose became a theme of our class, especially when we began writing the Rhetorical Analysis paper because we had to explain the purpose of any text. Writing with a purpose was also practiced while writing the Genre Recreation Paper. Learning this skill was very important to me and I hadnt even realized it. Anyone can write a paper, but if there is no final conclusion or point to the paper it means nothing. In my mid term reflection letter I wrote that I needed to put more effort into the peer reviews. I actually did not have the chance to fully achieve this goal because the two papers that I peer reviewed only consisted of one page of work each. This was disappointing because I was willing to spend a good portion of time giving honest advice and opinions. Despite this set back, I ended up peer reviewing my roommates paper and receiving the same perks because I found a couple grammar mistakes I had repeated in my paper. If it werent for reviewing a friends paper I would have never caught these mistakes. In my Literacy Memoir Paper I wrote that my biggest problem was that I didnt review my papers well enough to catch obvious errors in grammar and spelling. I believe this problem was addressed correctly just from realizing I am a college student now. In high school I never

took the teachers seriously, much less the classes. I understand that sounds bad, but now that I am in college, my grades directly relate to my future career and it also helps that I have matured a lot since high school. All the papers Ive turned in this semester had been read multiple times, read aloud at least once, and many people have reviewed for me. The genre recreation paper was the most intense revision I had to do because I wrote it a different way. I tried ignoring the spelling, grammar, flow and transitions all together just to get my thoughts out. I took this approach because there was an article you made us read that says there was an author who wrote on a typewriter and completely ignored these things. The paper turned out great in substance but I was probably the only one who would have understood it. This is no longer a problem for me because now I plan enough time to review at my own pace before the assignment is due. This semester I believe that I took a few risks and played it safe a couple times as well. For example, when faced with the option of choosing a text, I chose a photograph I knew a lot about. This time I played it safe because I knew that this choice was going to determine two papers for me. I took a big risk later in the semester by choosing to write a poem for the genre recreation. I chose this difficult task because Ive always wanted to write a poem. I believe this risk was definitely worth it because I love the way the poem turned out and it didnt cost anything to make unlike some other projects. I have learned that in all classes, weighing the options between playing it safe and taking a risk is a very important step to being successful in college and life. I have recognized many of strengths and weaknesses this semester through the three main writing assignments we were given. I noticed a strength of mine is the ability to make a reader stay intrigued. I believe this is a strength of mine because during peer reviewing I tend to make people laugh and they usually stay entertained. I believe this strength has recently occurred

because I am now learning to enjoy writing and I think the more the writer enjoys it the more the reader will enjoy it as well. Another strength of mine is learning not to procrastinate. This helps my writing because the sooner I write the paper; the longer I have to perfect it through editing. Despite my great strides in writing this semester, I still have a few faults I need to work. A weakness of mine is still not using transitions between paragraphs. I suppose if I worked hard enough I could transition my sentences better but sometimes I feel like the paragraphs shouldnt be connected. However, this is not always the case and I do realize it hinders the flow of the paper. I also have trouble when it comes to vocabulary. I do not have a very extensive list of vocabulary and I usually rely mostly on the thesaurus. This hinders my writing by using words that dont say what I meant and I feel I can make my point better with my own words. I plan to fix this problem by trying to think of words on my own before directly turning to the thesaurus every time a word seems to be to informal. Compared to the beginning of the semester and now, I have a completely altered view of writing. Now I feel comfortable about writing a new paper, opposed to before when I had low confidence with my writing. For example, at the beginning of the semester you gave us the Literacy Assignment and gave us a week to write four pages. I was honestly terrified. I proved myself I could do it and my confidence about writing has grown a little bit each class since then. While polishing my drafts I did a substantial amount revising to my papers. The most common new revision in the Rhetorical Analysis Paper is word choice. I also changed the introductory paragraph quite a bit to accommodate the change of direction in the rest of the paper. I learned that the introductory paragraph usually needs to be reviewed after the paper is written because the main points sometimes change or are not as important in the paper anymore. The most valuable advice you gave me was to add more elaboration to the paragraph about how

the photographs purpose may be to provoke hunger. This added length to the paper while still being worthwhile. While revising my Genre Recreation Defense Paper a common piece of revision that kept coming up was to combine sentences. During our conference, you explained to me that this was occurring because I was writing choppy and could be a lot more concise with my writing. I took your advice and changed many other sentences in the paper that you did not point out but could benefit from that advice. I learned that being concise and elaborating could both be accomplished in a paper. Before this semester, I thought that being concise meant deleting elaboration. In this paper I proved that I was wrong by adding elaboration in some part of the paper while still being concise. Similar to my Rhetorical Analysis Paper I also changed many words to better make my points. The Genre Recreation was actually most difficult for me because it is where I took my largest risk of the semester that I mentioned earlier. The Fall Resolution poem was very time consuming but was well worth it. This project was most difficult for me because it included research, creativity while English rules still applying. I thoroughly enjoyed writing the poem and I believe it really made me grow a writer. The papers were very informative and clear, but the poem was a chance to show myself in my writing. In summary, my writing has progressed greatly this semester. I still have faults to my writing but I have a lot more strengths now then I did at the beginning of the semester. I look forward to continuing to learn in your English 1102 course in the spring semester.