Over the course of the semester I’ve learned many new skills that will stay with me and help me throughout my life, such as that I have high creative ability when it comes to creating unique fiction stories off the cuff but my biggest difficulty when it comes to writing is the planning/setup stage. When I can establish a core idea in my head a\for a setting or premise I can write fast and easily as the ideas flow through my head. My main difficulty is if i have to write based on a set framework or medium that restricts due to taking me out of my comfort zone. These challenging mediums or guidelines where I struggled the most at the beginning was when needing to write dialogue, and when writing poems as I was relatively inexperienced with those. The class has helped me understand that I need to establish myself a clear template or baseline idea of how I will organize the writing piece and then I can go through writing easily even if I should struggle with a certain piece. A good example of this would be writing a dialogue assignment, which was something that i hadn’t done before in my school life, this was a struggle for me mainly due to trying to make the dialogue sound natural and not robotic as a back and forth conversation. The class taught me to get through this by first setting up a central premise for the dialogue to be taking place in, a premise that can  be interesting enough to write multiple lines of back and forth dialogue without making the speaking parties sound repetitive or like they are saying too little. I further learned to make the lines sound natural and non robottic by breaking the speaking sections down into sections, where each section will address an aspect of the overarching topic and be branched together with a natural sounding segways.

The class has also helped my writing skills when it comes to different types of pieces, as I would previously have most experience writing standard essay structured stories. One of the mediums I had the least experience with was poetry, I have always had trouble writing or analyzing poems mainly due to the relative lengths of poems. The poems always seemed too short to be able to write and portray an effective theme or story when I have been tasked with writing poems, and when analyzing them I ran into the problem of feeling like many poems are too vague due to their size. I have learned to write effective poetry by thinking of a wider idea and trying to compartmentalize it down to a poem format, plus I have learned that I don’t necessarily have to make a point blatantly clear in a poem, and that they allow for a vagueness. The beauty of poems is that they can be so short yet still leave the reader pondering about what is being said and to extrapolate that into a much larger discussion.

The class has also helped me understand how to pro[perly handle my writing time and write effective pieces in styles that normally wouldn’t be my strong point. I can use this in the future in school and potentially work when asked to write something that would be out of my comfort zone such as a nonfiction story or writing convincing dialogue. Challenging yourself is an important point in furthering your writing prowess and becoming a better writer to the point that you can feel satisfied with a medium that you would have been adverse to in the past.