Since the beginning of my senior year in high school, my writing has always been questioned. Graduating from a Liberal Arts high school paved a way for me to express myself in writing in various ways. I can honestly say I did not know how to organize my thoughts, was never descriptive, made many grammatical errors; overall, I never met the criteria. After senior year, I believed my worked had progressed. When I got to college, I had a semester break from English, and this affected my writing in so many ways. In addition, the courses I took didn’t require much writing. My friends also told me how challenging college composition is so I automatically thought my writing process was going to be under scrutiny.
The first paper I wrote for this course was a narrative essay. I was very skeptical on writing it because it had been so long since I wrote a narrative. One narrative we read in class, “Once More to the Lake" by E.B. White, helped me decide on a topic. Since it was so descriptive; I could actually imagine myself having a conversation with the character. The character is telling their life story. In high school, I suffered from not being descriptive. So, for my narrative I decided to be descriptive as possible. I wrote about the time my friend and I were lost. I used a lot of directive and expressive language. In class we peer reviewed each other’s narratives, which helped a lot, received good criticisms from the rough draft. This helped to improve my writing for the final draft. In high school, my narratives was not really well, but, in this particular essay, I became more descriptive and vivid.
After this essay, I started to focus on my next assignment: A Parody of a Newspaper Story. This is one of my favorite essays to write because I could practice more on being descriptive. Before drafting the paper, two volunteers in class shared their essays. This helped me a lot because it gave me a feel for what I was supposed to do. One newspaper that help me become imaginative was Aliens Evade Earth. This newspaper article was extremely imaginative and descriptive. After the given ideas from the volunteers, I had no issue writing my parody. I wrote Yeezy for President. This assignment helped me display my descriptive abilities. The columns helped me to become more organized in what I was trying to write. This assignment has the most importance to me because I’m writing for The Odyssey. It really got my feet wet to structuring and writing a newspaper article. In writing my first article about my transition from high to college, I learned lessons and improved.
The newspaper was pretty interesting, but not as interesting as the next paper. I wrote a paper on observations among a certain group. This had to the most challenging paper for me because I was never asked to do this kind of paper. My first idea was who am I going to observe? How can I put my observation in words? After deciding who I was going to write about, I immediately jotted a few things that I observed. Again, tried to be as descriptive as possible. When I write papers, I want the reader to feel as if we are having a conversation. When I finished this paper, I was astonished on how much confidence is in my writing.
Compared to my senior year writing and now, I see much improvement. I find this weird, but I love to read my writings like singers listen to their songs. Since I have overcame my problem of not being a good writer, I enjoy writing poetry, songs, and outside work (The Odyssey). Even though I am a chemistry major, I am looking forward to furthering my English writing in college. Soon enough, I would be writing books for future English students who had the same problem that I did.
