Writing was never so simple for me. Writing takes time and dedication because of the immense amount of components needed in a piece of writing. When I first understood the meaning of writing that is when I first took off with my ideas. I also thought of writing like baking a cake because if you miss a component it’s like missing a layer of cake, and if you’re missing a layer of cake it’s like missing an essential portion of your essay.
One major key that everyone should know about writing is that style is essential towards making good writing. Style is important because the way you choose to phrase your sentences changes the way your ideas are expressed to the audience. For example, this semester of freshman composition I was assigned to complete an inquiry-based essay. In this essay, I had to support my claim and gather information to prove my thesis was correct. In the inquiry-based essay, I had to implement a persuasive style in order for the audience to understand my opinions, ideas, and stance. This writing assignment helped me realize that your style of writing is necessary in order to get your message across to the audience and create the mood of your writing in order to make the audience feel some type of way.
When creating a piece of writing it is major that you’re writing contains all key rhetorical terms: rhetorical situation, audience, author, tone, purpose, genre, medium, stance, and language. These rhetorical terms create an effect on the reader. In my inquiry-based essay, I contained an informative tone that allowed the reader to have a certain emotion. It is important to notice that the way words and phrases are said can affect the way your writing changes and the way your ideas are portrayed. Tone, stance, medium, and genre form the shape of your writing by setting the attitude that you want to give towards your audience. Purpose is what the author is trying to express towards its audience.
When I first enrolled in this course I didn’t realize how important the strategy of in-text citations were. It came to my attention that in-text citations were essential for my writing because I received a fifty on my sourced based essay. The reason I received a fifty on my easy was due to the fact that my evidence in my essay did not contain text citations. It is crucial that citations are added in essays so that your essay doesn’t get graded as plagiarized. Thankfully I had the opportunity to resubmit my essay with the correct MLA citations and I received an eighty-seven. I reflect on that moment consistently every time I write an essay because from that day on I have always looked closely at all the evidence to see if I added the author and correct page number.
This brings me to the most important literature strategy that I think everyone should master in order to create excellent writing. In my opinion, revision is the most mandatory writing strategy needed because the more drafts you create the more your paper will improve. When I wrote multiple papers this semester I learned that revising my own paper and using feedback from peers helped me become a better writer. Revising multiple times made me realize the weaknesses in my writing and grammatical errors. From all the revisions it created a well written organized paper that came out to be way a huge improvement from the first draft. The rhetorical precis assignment was the assignment that I really used the strategy of revision. I did a total of around four rewrites in order to get the highest grade possible on it. Writing is about creating mistakes but reflecting on the mistakes you made to improve future assignments.
Moreover, peer review is an important writing strategy because it allows you to realize mistakes that you could have also committed in your writing. The feedback you receive also helps to improve your skills as a writer and it gives reassurance to the author. What I mean by reassurance is that sometimes as an author you feel like the work you have written does not make sense, but when you have someone to go over your writing it helps you to clarify yourself that the piece is complete.
For this English course, the course learning outcome that I mastered the least is “Understand and use print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences”. I feel like I mastered this learning outcome the least is because I didn’t incorporate any newspaper or magazine information into my writings. The use of print is using newspapers, magazines, and any other printed material. My writings mainly consisted of online scholarly articles from the CCNY database. The use of multimedia was not used in my inquiry-based essay, and I could have used it to address a range of different people for my audience. In the near future, I will incorporate more print media and digital media into my writings so I could master the use of print and digital technologies to address a range of audiences. One course learning outcome that I mastered the most this semester was “Practice systematic application of MLA citation conventions”. I feel like I mastered this the most was because the skill of in-text citations really improved throughout my writings. It mostly improved when I wrote my inquiry-based essay and I had to cite all the evidence that I gathered from all my sources.
Overall, this freshman composition class informed me about the importance of writing and how to become a better writer. You have to work hard and reflect on your flaws to improve on all your components of writing. I have gathered and acquired many writing skills throughout these four months that I will continue to use in my senior year of high school and my years in college. Writing takes time, dedication, and practice. The more you write the more your ideas can be expressed clearly.
