Reflection Post

David Hefty

English 102.006

Mr. Micer

May 2, 2011

Reflection Post

            I am at the very end of my second semester here at Purdue North Central and I have had a great experience with my first year of college. I was not sure exactly how things would go with transitioning from high school but transitioning from high school to college was not near as hard as I thought it would be. I have learned a lot this semester but more so over the first year since I have had the same teacher for both semesters. I like having the same teacher for both semesters because I was able to adapt to his way of teaching and I caught on to it. I learned to develop my sentence structure and ideas in a much more elaborate and professional manner. Which therefore, helped to make a more enjoyable class, I do not believe by any means that I am a perfect writer but this class has made writing easier. It would be difficult for me to revise my work after writing it and try to expand my sentences before this class, now it is still difficult but I have learned new ways to reach that goal. The lessons this semester on academic argument, although very general, I have applied to two of my other classes this semester when I was asked to write papers for those classes. The five brushstrokes for writing is something that I will always try to remember because it broke different components of writing down into simpler means and I was able to apply things from this class to my other classes. My best piece of wok would be writing project three because I developed my writing skills over time. Also, because I was able to insert a picture in the writing which I feel, grabbed the readers attention. My writing was enhanced to a higher level with the lessons I learned in class. I am a more visual person when it comes to learning and when we would do the examples in class from someone else’s writing it really allowed me to pick apart my own writing and revise it to a higher level. I was able to apply some of the same things I was doing in my paper to those that I saw in the papers we reviewed in class. My strength in writing would be the writing of the body paragraphs. I have a much easier time coming up with ideas for the paper as a whole as opposed to the introduction and conclusion. I just think these are the hardest to do because it has always been difficult for me to start or end a paper. So I would say these are the two areas of writing that I would need to develop in and to develop in elaborating my sentence structures a bit more. Obviously, no one is perfect and I can clearly see my writing can use work. I hope to develop my writing even more as time progresses.

            I believe that I should receive a letter grade of a B in the class. I revised my papers to an acceptable level but I will not deny that I do not spend a great deal of time or effort on revising them. I received C’s on all of my papers throughout the class but with the great attendance I have had this semester, I believe that should improve my grade only to an extent because without coming to class I would not have near of as good of an understanding of the numerous subjects we covered in class week in and week out. By showing up to class every day I was able to grasp the subject of the lesson even better. Also, I participated in class discussion greatly over this semester. I truly think if I had not participated as much in class, I would not have as good of a handle on things because by interacting in the class I was able to keep attentive and actually learn what was being said. I know this only accounts for a portion of the grade but without having class participation, I believe class would not have been as much fun to come to and would have dragged on.