Over the course of this English semester, I’ve learned many skills that can help me inside and outside of school. I learned about other ways to get a point across without having to write an essay and time management for the most part. This was the first time in my college experience that I could explain my topic without writing an essay. I also noticed that throughout this semester, I can better read and understand the text more efficiently while growing as a writer.

Looking back on how I view my writing is not the way I see my writing now. Before I used to think that my writing didn’t make sense and it wasn’t enough to explain the question at hand. I felt like I didn’t believe in my writing because I had never liked to write since I was a kid. I always used to write my essay without any brainstorming what to write to better sort my ideas about what I should write. This was a very bad habit that I had and made me write longer than I should have because I didn’t know what to write. Now I learned to hit the brakes and slow down the way I write my essays without skipping the brainstorming process. This process helped me clear and sort my ideas in a time-efficient manner so writing the actual essay is quick and easy. Brainstorming is a process that should be skipped because it helps with the organization of my ideas and it will only negatively affect my writing if I continued to skip it.

During in this semester, I have seen how much my work has changed since the beginning of the semester. Before the semester I wasn’t confident in my ideas and answers in my writing so it made it hard to find the answers to some questions in my writing. Now I’m more confident in my writing because of me rereading more than once and opinions on my writing from people other than myself. People viewing my work makes me look at my work from a different point of view because I always look at my writing as an author and not a reader. If I continue to look at my writing from different points of view, my writing will be greater than it already is.

During the revision cycle, I was able to see my mistakes and corrected them the way I saw fit. Also, it helped correct the tone of my essay. What was challenging for me in this class was the general fact that I never liked to write. The reason I don’t like to write is that it was always boring to me and I always had to write about something I never found interesting. I overcame this by a quote my middle school ELA teacher used to say to me that I wrote in my Unit 1 final assignment which stated, “I looked over at Ms.Gordon and smiled as I remembered what she had told me months ago, “Sometimes in life you have to do things you don’t want to do but you do it because you have to.”

Surprisingly, in this course, I didn’t have any assignments that I didn’t like because all the assignments in this course was genuinely interesting to me and I got to choose what I wanted to write for my Unit 2 assignment. But my favorite assignment in this class was the Unit #3 final assignment. In this assignment, we had to choose another way to explain the answer to my Unit 2 essay as anything other than an essay. For my unit #3, I chose to make a picture book about the dangers of marijuana. I was able to use other skills other than writing like visual art. I put pictures to show a visual representation of the dangers of marijuana with the main facts on the other page. In the book I made I put that, ” High blood pressure also known as hypertension is when the force of blood flowing against the artery walls too high. Being one of the most dangerous, high blood pressure can lead to heart failure, dementia, aneurysm, heart attacks, etc.” Without writing too much, I was able to inform the audience of the definition of the danger and what the danger can cause with a picture show where on the body it will affect. Being able to do this shows me that writing is not as bad as I thought it was. Being able to write in different forms shows the growth that I’ve developed when taking part in this course in college.