Reflection Letter PDF

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Summary

As part of the writing sequence, your final portfolio (collection of essays) may be read by writing instructors who are unfamiliar with you or your work. so in a final letter to the “reader”, you will provide an overview of your work for the semester.

Please include the following in a 2...

Description

Naomi Sterling Professor Kuttner WRIT 1000.28 11.24.2020

At the beginning of this semester, I was completely new to college writing. Even though I thought my writing skills were good, it was okay to admit that I needed some help. Many of the skills I learned during high school helped me, but I also realized that high school didn’t prepare me well for college writing. Throughout this semester, I experienced many new ways to write different types of essays. I put a lot of time and effort into each essay I wrote hoping to make it perfect. I learned many techniques and skills to improve my writing now and for the future. I learned to make sure to consider my audience when writing a paper, and my professor emphasized the importance of using reliable resources to support my ideas in each paper. I can say that I still need to improve my organizational skills to make my writing flow better, but I think I succeeded in accomplishing my most important goal, which was to not be overly critical of my writing. I finally learned that if I don’t over-think my papers while writing them and stopped trying to make them perfect, writing becomes so much easier for me. I’ve learned a lot about myself as a writer and with the assignments we did, I was able to see the mistakes I commonly made. For example, I can sometimes use unnecessary words that make my work hard to read. When I continuously overthink, I end up going off track in my writing and have trouble sticking to the thesis.

The first essay we wrote was about my writing goals during my college career. Because this was our first essay, I continuously wrote and deleted my work because I convince myself that my writing isn’t good. I tried my best to not let my thoughts interfere with my work and told myself to not delete anything. I was anxious when submitting my first draft, but when I surprisingly received a good grade I felt as if it was a sign for me to trust myself and believe my writing was good. I felt extremely confident and am now able to submit work without having the anxiety that I did terribly. The hardest assignment for me to complete was the essay comparing the music of the 60s to today. I struggled with this because I had to figure out how to introduce each side of the conversation, with Juan Williams being against the music of today and my personal opinion about the difference between the music of today vs the music of the 60s. I did my research to understand the many opinions and perspectives of today’s music. It was difficult to argue my perception and support it with my own claims. This essay tested both my argument and analyzing skills, and critical thinking was a large part of this assignment. I struggled with including information about an issue while being able to cohesively include my claims, opinions, and perspectives. When I submitted my drafts, not only for this essay but other essays as well, the main thing I had to work on was my organization. I had to put a lot of effort into where I would include specific information and how to sound informed and educated when phrasing what I wanted to say. Even though this essay wasn’t as good as I wanted it to be, I truly believe that this course taught me how to improve my critical thinking skills. I learned how to analyze a conversation with different perspectives and gained the ability to create an argument with supporting claims. On top of this, I can say that I’m now able to say

what I need to in a direct, straightforward way. I used the same skills to revise my capstone final paper. When I read when I sent in for the first day of class, I was honestly a little embarrassed. My essay was beyond unorganized and it was evident that I had trouble writing. For my final paper, I tried to put effort into the organization of the paper and I made my opinion on the topic very clear. Besides this, I keep reminding myself to trust myself and not convince myself that my writing is bad. These skills can improve my writing as a whole and will help me with any type of writing I’d have to do throughout college and my forensic psychology career. I’m happy to say I feel confident that my writing is better now than when I just started. Instead of thinking of writing as something to do and get done, I think of it as a process I have to follow to succeed. Many of the different assignments we did helped me improve my skills in drafting, critical thinking, and organizing, but most importantly it helped me realize that it’s okay to make mistakes. I don’t have to make my writing perfect, and receiving feedback from both my professor and other classmates was helpful because it came from an outside perspective instead of the overpowering critiques I gave myself. My work is definitely not perfect, but for my first semester in college, I am more than willing to put in the time and effort it takes to become a better writer. As I progress throughout my college career, I hope to maintain and improve my skills as much as I can. I hope to have more practice using the skills I’ve learned, and I also would like to be better at analyzing the writing of other authors and the type of rhetoric they use. Writing is something that will continue to be an important aspect of my life and it’s not something I’ll just

leave behind after graduating, which is why I think it’s important to take these skills with me for the rest of my life....