Semester 1 Unit Reflection

  1. Which of your pieces was the most challenging to write?
    • I think the short story with a twist was the hardest to write because it first took me a while to think of a good topic to write about that also has an interesting and unexpected twist at the end. Then when I finally thought of what to write about, I didn’t know how to actually write the story well without giving away the ending. I wasn’t sure how to organically write the story with a natural lead up to the ending. But in the end, I finished it and after some peer feedback about the story being a bit hard to follow, I tweaked it a bit before publishing.
  2. Which of your pieces was the most enjoyable to write?
    • My descriptive essay of a childhood story was really fun to write. It gave me a great outlet to tell this weird story from my childhood and I thought it was really cool. Since we had to use so many different kinds of literary devices, I found myself describing things in ways I wouldn’t usually think of. All in all, it was a new way to tell an old and very silly story.
  3. What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?
    • I think some of the strengths in writing that I have is my grammar and overall fluency in writing. However, I don’t write or get my ideas out as fast as I would like to. Like I said earlier, I have an idea a lot of the time, but have no idea how to execute it correctly. This leads to a lot of “writer’s blocks” that I need to get over.
  4. What have you done to develop your strengths and minimize your weaknesses as a writer? How successful do you feel you’ve been?
    • I don’t think I’ve been too successful in developing my strengths because I’ve never really thought about them much. However, to help with my weaknesses, I try to write everything I’m thinking down when I’m doing the quick writes in class. Many of the ideas I have are repeated, so a lot of the time I don’t think they’re worth typing out, but doing the quick write under time pressure helps me pump out more ideas which I can refine later.
  5. What kind of future career or field of study are you considering? What kinds of writing might be important in this?
    • I’m not too sure on the specific field I want to be in yet, however I’m rather captivated by the sciences either hard or soft. This kind of field requires a good amount of research capabilities so informational papers will be helpful in the future.
  6. What advice would you offer the College Writing teachers as they plan this course for next year? What might be some additional pieces of writing to add and why? How was the timing and pacing? Did you receive enough feedback? Did you receive enough instruction and input so you knew how to do each assignment? What did you like or not like and why? What would make this more student-friendly, provide more learning or make it more interesting?
    • For next year, I think that there should be more exploration into college acceptance letters and what is important to keep in mind when writing them. We could try writing more pieces that will be helpful in college as well, such as research or thesis papers. The timing was great, things weren’t too rushed, but the deadlines were sensible and understandable. Many of the pieces we did in this class were peer-edited, and I think it would be more helpful to have more time for the teacher to see what we’re doing. This would be beneficial in getting a grade that aligns with a rubric that we understand.