During this semester, I learned more about myself and my writing abilities. For one, bad moments in life can be made into art with your writing. I have had bad experiences in life, and it just so happened to be the first thing that popped into my head every time we had to do an assignment. At first, I was unsure of how my professor would react to it or even my peers if we had to do group work and share. But I learned that it’s fine to write about negativity. Sometimes negativity brings positivity and that’s what I received from my professor and peers throughout the semester. I also learned that I had a good way of critiquing people’s work. At first when we were told we were going to critique people’s work, I was a bit nervous because I didn’t want to come off as mean or say something and they took it the wrong way. But overtime, I realized that I enjoy critiquing people’s work and I have a way with words to make it not sound bad. The main takeaways with the writing aspect of things were that I became fearless of expressing myself despite the writing being about a negative situation as well as learning and becoming comfortable with critiquing people’s work.

For the reading aspect of things, I definitely feel as if I gained a sense of patience. We had to do a ton of reading this semester from reading texts to reading peers work every class. I used to hate reading any type of text or even doing peer work sometimes because I just had this lack of patience. However, I don’t know if it’s because this was an in-person class or because the work was intriguing, but I was excited to do group work and get to peek inside everyone’s creativity. I think another takeaway or benefit from doing a bunch of peer work was that I learned a lot from them. They had kind words for feedback and had ways to help me. I found myself reading over some peer’s work time and time again simply because I enjoyed their work and wanted to learn from it and create my sense of style to my writing with the help of theirs. Before I would never re read peers work simply because I was very impatient. But thankfully, this class helped me gain more patience when it came to that aspect.

I will take away this new sense of patience that I gained as well as the critiquing. Not only with writing can this be applied to but in life as well. This class has honestly taught me how to give feedback in a way where I don’t feel like I sound too harsh, and this was something I’ve always been afraid of when it came to that. I feel like a way where I can apply this newfound ability to critique in life is when I find a job. As already seen from some of my writing pieces, I haven’t had the best of luck with jobs. My issue is I always been afraid to speak up for myself or speak up when I see something wrong in a workplace. My fear was to fumble my words, and have it come out in a bad way where I would then get looked at bad or even get in trouble. But now since I have had a bunch of practice when it comes to giving feedback and my thoughts, opinions, and recommendations, I feel like whenever the time comes where I find a new job, I can apply these skills when necessary. Lastly, this new skill of being more patient will definitely come in handy in every aspect of my life, especially with reading for my other classes. I noticed that during this semester I have been able to re-read a lot more than I used to when it came to other classes and the work that needed to be done. This was something I struggled with a lot before because again, I had no patience to read. But I feel more patient in general when it comes to reading things and it feels amazing. This class has taught me a lot and I’m very happy that this was my first in person class at City Tech. Definitely a great experience.