Amani Nassar
English 1121
Dr. Hall
May 21, 2019
My Growth
Before I had even entered the classroom for English 1101, I knew from the start that I was going to hate it. I had already had a terrible experience with this same English class at a previous college and it affected my gpa so negatively that I knew this experience would probably be no different. I felt so pressured to get an A because I want to be a nurse and an A grade is basically the only way in there. When assigned my first paper I had no idea what I was going to write about, I didn’t understand the reading nor the terms it used, I knew I was in trouble. To my surprise though, with a lot of rereading, asking questions, and listening to my classmates thoughts, I wrote a pretty decent essay. It was decent enough that my professor (you Dr.Hall!) used my essay as an example for the class, I couldn’t have been more proud of my writing than I was that day. In English 1101, I feel like I had the most growth as a writer, but it did however continue into English 1121.
From the very beginning of this semester I knew all of my essay needed to have “more of me” in them. I’ve always struggled adding my personality and personal thoughts into my writing for the simple fact that I always got bashed for doing so in high school. My teachers use to just want the answers to the prompt and nothing more, but now in college I finally had the chance to add my own style to my writing. Because of teachers like the ones I had, I hated to write and I never thought that I could write a good essay, but the real problem was that I was never writing about something I was interested in and I never had a teacher who wanted more than just the basics of the prompt.
I find that I’m most driven to write when I have opportunity to give my opinion, when I can explain my life experiences or when I’m passionate about a topic like the community. I like to write for any audience of individuals that are open minded and are willing to debate or give feedback. One of my strengths that I learned as a writer this semester was being able to go more in depth with my writing giving my readers more detail. In one of my very first essay about education I said “being that I live with my Puerto Rican side of the family, I felt as though I was missing out on the experiences my other culture could offer me,” but there was not much to follow up on this quote. When I revised this essay I was able to add more details that could help my readers better understand my cultures by giving them scenes like when I said “I remember when I was younger I would walk into the room sometimes and see my father on the floor praying and would walk right up next to him pretending to pray just like him.” In this quote my readers can now have more of an insight on how I still got to experience my Palestinian culture as I grew up seeing my father practice Islam even though I lived in a Puerto Rican household.
Another strength I acquired this semester is being able to better organizing my writing so that my ideas flow without any disruption. In my gentrification memo I was able to end my paragraphs and follow them up in the following paragraph. For example I ended my first paragraph by asking my readers “why is Brooklyn being so gentrified?” I then followed this question up by saying “I don’t think there is one real explanation for why people come to live in Brooklyn and gentrify it to their liking. There are so many factors that contribute to the gentrification of what was once Brooklyn.” Here I am able to give my readers some food for thought as I question what they may feel and then give them some facts that can add to or change their view.
My strengths have become writing techniques that I will need to keep enhancing to better my writing because with each assignment comes a different mindset and skills needed to complete it. Although I have grown this semester I still have some weak aspects that I will continue to work on. A lot of the times before I start my writing I overthink it, I take a simple assignment and turn it into something so stressful that it makes it harder for me to focus on what it is that I have to do.
My growth as a writer began at the beginning of the semester and will continue to grow outside of the classroom. As I said in my education essay “everyday is a new learning experience for me” and that entails not only my life experiences, but also the skills I learn in class. This is just the start to me becoming a better writer, the best is yet to come. I want to be remembered as a writer who once wrote mediocre essay that didn’t make it out of the hands of the teacher to then becoming a writer who is constantly improving with each writing.
