Manuel Barreras – Final Reflection

 Going into the semester has been a challenge in itself, specifically pertaining to this class. To be more specific, my reason for registering for this class was to understand myself in terms of being a writer and how I can improve my writing. From a personal standpoint, My academic career has had somewhat of a focus on writing because it’s what I have always been good at, especially during middle school and high school, many of my teachers have praised me because of my critical thinking and being able to properly format my ideas for a reader to read when I write a piece of work. Before joining this course, my expectations were somewhat high because this is a creative writing course which does mean that you have to brainstorm a lot in order to create and develop ideas that are different and unique to your writing style and can be seen as something special to the reader. 

What I have learned from myself as a writer taking this course this semester would be that I am not the best storyteller, and my writing process could use some improvement, but overall, is creative in itself. To explain the storytelling part, we have had assignments that have to do with storytelling and creating your own story whether it be fictional or nonfictional, and I am not the best at having a creative writing process when it comes to “making up” something, it has always been a struggle of mine and I intend to work on it as much as I can to improve and expand my knowledge of writing. To explain my writing process in general, I have personally learned that I am not afraid to bring certain topics and issues to light, and speak on these topics and issues in a factual manner that can back up my point of view to make it interesting for the reader.

From what I can personally see in my own opinion, what I have learned from being a reader this semester would have to be that it is very necessary to have an open mind to learning about different writing styles and opinions that you’re not necessarily comfortable with in order to gain the knowledge that helps you comprehend not only the work of your peers, but your own work as well. A great example of this would have to be when we were given an assignment that had to be sent to our cohort, and then was critiqued for the writer to see, and upon receiving these critiques, incorporating it into our work for the revised version. I personally believe that this was a great writing exercise in order to further add depth to the writer’s piece of work and also create a complex way of thinking for the writer in order to use this later on with other assignments that took on the same format, constructive criticism is key to making a writer more open-minded to the opinions that aren’t their own. 

Overall, this course in itself was definitely a challenge to my writing/thought process and definitely helped me expand my horizons. I feel like I will definitely be able to use what I’ve learned and be able to apply it to multiple situations going forward within my life, for example, if there is ever a situation where I am not given an opportunity to use a specific period of time to gain different opinions on my writing, I will most likely ask other people what are their thoughts and opinions on the specific topic I am writing about, and then try to understand their thought process when they read my work. This, personally, is something that I feel is really important and should be taken seriously by other writers in this class because it really does strengthen your knowledge and essentially forces you to do your own research on things that might be foreign to you like different writing techniques done within a different country, or how to properly take critiques as constructive criticism rather than an insult to your writing, opinions people have to your work will always be subjective and with that, it should be respected that someone might not like or be interested in what you write, but their opinions can be the difference between a subpar piece of writing or a creatively unique literary work.