Reflective Letter

At the beginning of the quarter, I felt that I was a fairly strong writer. I found out how dangerous that assumption could be after recieving the first essay's grade, which showed where I really stood. College level writing is much more difficult than any gradeschool I've ever gone to has assigned. Although it was challenging to really buckle down and get working, I have shown much progress from the beginning of the year. This can be shown within my first and last essays, which are included in my portfolio. Essay number one was on Bacon's Rebellion and how social classes played the largest role within the rebellion itself. My last essay was a group project, me and three others, and was perhaps the most difficult to both get done and get done well. Both of these essays have specific strong and weak points, as well as tie into my writing philosophy and style.

My first essay, on social classes within Bacon's Rebellion, was worded well. I felt that I tried hard to get quality information into the essay and get it done. However, that was a highschool thought process that I was going through, and my brain needed to mature fast to get quality work done in such a timely fashion. The end result was not up to college standards at all, because the information was lax, and it lacked a real voice. That problem, lacking a voice in essays, really stems from my educational career prior to arriving at PSEC; before I arrived at Puget Sound Early College, I mainly wrote informative essays. My instructor stressed the fact that we would not write informative essays since the beginning of the Writing 101 course. Since I recieved feedback on my first essay I have really worked on gathering more useful information and applying time management skills to my writing.

Many of the problems I had with the Bacon's Rebellion essay could be seen as similiar to those withing the third essay, but let me explain. The third essay was on federalism within Massachusetts regarding the Constitution. It was unique in the fact that four people were working on it at once, which really required a lot of different time management skills than normal. One of the main issues within my latest essay was not the lack of a voice, but the presence of too many voices. The essay was poorly edited, and each voice was apparent thus confusing to the readers. On my part, however, time management was not a problem, because I got each individual paragraph and opinion piece done in a timely fashion. Also, I feel that my opinion was very well written, concise, and cohesive. This boosted the overall grade of the essay itself, and helped my ability show even within a group of three others.

As my overviews of those two essays show, time management has greatly improved. Really, getting an essay or writing assignment is not the problem very often at all. I can get the final product done as quickly as I need to. My weaknesses lie withing the actual essays themselves. Though I have been working on it throughout the quarter, I still find it hard to get useful information that is specific; I find myself using generalized information to base my arguments off of, or strengthen my arguments. Overall, I have made progress with my writing abilities. I have not gotten worse at anything, either gotten better or stayed consistently under par.

Two aspects of my writing must be looked at to get a good view of just where I stand with writing: my writing philosophy and style. My writing philosophy at the beginning of the year was as follows: writing of any kind must always start with a main idea to build off of. What seems to me to be the best way to show where I am at now would be to slightly skew the aforesaid sentence. I do not believe that it must always start with a main idea, but some sort of idea in general. Some idea of what purpose the writing at hand must serve is necessary to find useful information about the paper. I guess my newly stated writing philosophy would be: writing must alwasy start with the purpose of the paper in mind, so that information can be found in regard to the main idea. My style of writing has changed slightly. I no longer 'just write' as I would do in highschool. Now I write with much more structure and organization. I tend to get to the point as quickly as possible, now that I have taken Writing 101.

This quarter I learned how wrong it is to assume that you're good at writing. That statement is shown in the progress that I have made withing my essays. In my first essay, I didn't manage my time very well, and I wrote to simply get the paper done. However, my third essay went along much more smoothly for me, and I wrote with purpose. This is not to say that I have become the perfect writer. In fact, my first and third essays both show a lack of specific detail. They are both plagued with general information that doesn't support the thesis very well. Both my writing philosophy and writing style have changed slightly. Overall, I believe I have shown strong improvement in several catagories such as time management and organization, but I still need to work on finding and utilizing specific information to support my arguments.