Fall Semester 2024
Roger Engers
ENG 2100

In some ways I’ve improved this year was by:

In previous years, I failed to work up writing an essay. What I mean is, I never really constructed an outline, draft, free writing or a simple brainstorming exercise in its entirety before. During the span of this semester and course instructions, I have learned about the importance of starting small and working your way up to a final paper. It creates an organized and well thought out paper, which I believe I was holding me back. Likewise, peer editing was a big change for me this year, I did not like it when other people read my works because I felt as if I was exposing too much about myself, however I have learned that this is critical in understand your audience, yourself and who ever reading can potentially point me in the right direction or share the same situation / experience as me. In allowing others to read my works, I started loosening the critical standards that I hold myself to, and just began writing then adjusting later, rather than trying to create the perfected sentence, which absorbed a lot of time when writing.

Something that I acknowledge that I need to incorporate into my writing is a Rhetorical precis, this is used to give insight to the reader about an author / work used in your essay. I’ve tried including this into my essay’s however I think I need to polish on it more.

Also, I noticed that I do not my own input into my OWN writing which is really weird. Every class that I’ve taken leading up to this class has taught me to talk about the author and break down the techniques that they use in order to convey a certain feeling or message. But this class taught me that it’s important for my own voice to be heard in my writing, because if the reader wanted to learn about the author, I’m talking about then they would have just read their work. With that in mind, I’ve tried to break the habit of reminiscing about the author and what he/she/they said but It’s clear that I need to work on talking about my view / claim.

I’ve explored texts that I normally would not look at, such as lysicott’s three ways to speak English or Amy Tan’s Mother Tongue. These texts open my eyes to self-expression, oppression, marginalization and more. Initially the texts were confusing to me and I was disinterested however after further exploring the texts, I noticed that the topics explore deeper concepts of society, which have an impact on who I am and I can relate.

This semester I have seen a lot of improvement in my writing, however I believe there is much more room for me to grow.