Victoria Vitale
N. Bhandari
English Composition 1030
13 December 2018
Academic Reflection
Since I was a young girl, I had always loved to write whether it was letters, stories, or even poems. Over the course of my life I have grown and learned a tremendous amount about writing, and that it comes in all kinds of forms. Although I am a STEM and biology major and want to pursue my career of being a doctor, writing is something that I will never stop doing. Learning to express myself, formulate new ideas, and find answers to pending thoughts have all come clear to me through my writing. I pursued my dream of writing a book in my junior year of high school and getting it published as a freshman in college after taking multiple creative writing courses throughout my educational career. This English Composition course was one that I was looking forward to this semester due to my level of confidence in writing. I thought that since I was already a published author that my writing couldn’t be any better, but I was wrong; The most important lesson I have learned from English Composition is that there is ALWAYS room for improvement and bettering yourself; and that is the beauty of writing.
I have made tremendous progress over the duration of the semester and the reason for that is because I realized how important revision really is. For instance, the first essay I wrote for this course only had one rough draft before the final piece, while the last essay we wrote had three or four. Our first essay was a summary response essay on Hidden Intellectualism. The first part of the prompt asked us to summarize the article, and then we had to respond by either agreeing or disagreeing with the points that the author made. I thought, “easy enough right?” and constructed the essay without even reading it more than twice. At this point, we were instructed to bring our drafts to class for peer editing. I made the changes that my classmates suggested, printed it out and handed it in as my final draft. As you can see, I did not take the process of revising very seriously.
The second essay we wrote was our rhetorical analysis. While I was more confident writing this than the summary response, I actually put more work into revising it. I had two rough drafts before I submitted my final draft. This time, instead of just revising by incorporating the feedback from my peers, I re-read my essay multiple times. I looked to make sure I fulfilled all the key aspects of my essay such as pathos/ethos/logos, a clear claim, mature sentence structure, proper grammar etc. I definitely took this revision more seriously than the first one because I realized that there can always be things to revise and fix no matter how good I thought my essay was the first time. A rough draft is never done; it is just a bunch of unorganized thoughts put together in the format of an essay.
I most recently wrote my argument essay, and to me this one was the most difficult to construct. Not only do you need research from reliable sources, but you need claims, evidence to back up your claims, counterclaims, and enough knowledge on the topic to exhibit a strong argument. I felt it was very challenging to keep my thoughts organized while writing this essay. I was not satisfied with my essay until the fourth draft because I just kept finding room for improvement. After my first draft, I was told by my professor to give more clarity in my introduction, acknowledge more of a counterclaim, and to use the research as support to my own argument without turning the research INTO the argument. After reading back on my essay after receiving this feedback, I realized my professor was absolutely right. My introduction was fuzzy, I didn’t have a strong enough counterclaim and I was relying too much on research. I made revisions to this by adding more personal examples to support my position, adding statistics into my introduction, and creating two new counterclaim paragraphs that recognized the opposing side. After doing so, I sent my new draft to my professor for further revision. She proceeded to give me constructive criticism by advising me to focus on clarity in my introduction and to pay attention to the placement/relevance of some of my paragraphs. For example, I included a personal experience as a supporting detail for my argument, but it wasn’t relevant to use in the spot I had it in. I made sure to thoroughly read through my essay and make similar changes, along with making my introduction clearer for the readers eye. I was finally ready for a final draft after these precise revisions.
I have realized that just because I am a published author doesn’t mean my writing is always going to be perfect. However, I do set a high standard for myself since I am a hard worker and excel in writing and would not personally accept anything lower than an A. In my opinion, if I am competent enough to write and publish a book then there should be no reason for me not to ace my english course. This accomplishment of mine has increased my ego and has made me feel superior to those around me when it comes to writing. I find it difficult to take advice from my peers and accept that my writing can use work.
English Composition has not only continued my love for writing, but it taught me valuable lessons such as the importance of revision and how the littlest changes can make a piece of literature sound so much better. I hope my classmates got just as much out of this course as I did, and I hope this semester was a learning experience for my professor as well.
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