Adrian Polanco, Final reflection

Honestly, when I first enrolled for this class and figured it would be a writing-intensive one I couldn’t be bothered. All I knew was that I had to get a good grade and get the credit I needed for some random elective that I honestly didn’t put much care for. However, my perspective of what this class had to offer changed as the months went by. We started with the memoirs. I figured coming into this class that my writing was already extraordinary and out of this world, that was until I met some of my peers. Seeing the amount of effort, detail, dialogue, and all-around passion they put into writing made me always insecure about showing my pieces off to the professor when she would ask for a volunteer. With the memoir we were to pick a valuable item in which I picked a sweater my aunt gave to me as a gift, I went through the comments that were left by my cohort and realized just how flawed I was. Whether it be from basic spelling and grammar to the more convoluted details that I left out like dates, what exactly I had received it as since my first draft didn’t mention it being a birthday gift, and various other things. It was a shot through the heart for my ego seeing someone able to find so many flaws in my work, but it woke me up. It made me realize that I couldn’t just write whatever I wanted and think I would receive the best grades for it, I had to make sure these mistakes only happened the first time which as you read through my short story and poems you can see I wanted to make sure my writing was at a level that not only my professor was satisfied with but I myself as the writer was satisfied with submitting.