Monday, April 30, 2012

English 1 Reflection


             All of the writing we have done this year has shown me my strengths and weaknesses, such as my common errors, and aspects of writing. Every time I re-read a graded paper, I always noticed that I made a mistake, grammar or organization errors. I also noticed these errors during the peer reviews. The writing we did this year included Narratives, blog posts, and a Profile. All of these assignments involved a variety of methods of how to successfully plan and write the paper.
            People always said that in High School, we would have to write many papers. This information for me was a shock, because of my organization and supporting details. I figured out that planning my ideas in some sort of visual chart, such as a flow chart, helped me organize my thoughts in order for me to write my paper. I eventually became routinized in planning my ideas (which I had not done before). In doing so, I started strengthening my support in my papers. The rubrics you gave to us before most papers also helped me when I was proofreading and going back to add or remove certain statements.
            I then noticed another problem I had with writing assignments. Recently, I discovered I had a disorder in reading comprehension. It explained why I was not grasping the concept of the paper. In other words, I did not understand what to write the paper about. I usually felt confident about papers that I had written, until I received a grade for it. I sought help from you, Dr. deGravelles, and we focused on the Literary Analysis. The Literary Analysis was the paper where my disorder shown itself the most. My thoughts were very unorganized and the sentence fluency was tough to follow along. I then found a simple way to help this aspect of writing, which was once again making some sort of flow chart.
            I had gathered lots of information on my research paper topic and assembled them into ‘noodlebib’ notecards. Them when it came time to write the paper I had taken a few days trying to cram in more information and repeat ideas just to try and reach the length requirements. With haste, I turned in the paper confidently with out proof reading it that well. When I received the grade for it, I was astonished at how horrible the conventions of the paper were. I had many repeated words, run on sentences, comma splices, and punctuation outside quotation. I then doubted myself on why I chose such a difficult topic. In the comments for the paper, you specifically said,  “You need to put a lot more work into proofreading”, I agree with this statement. I have learned and will try to make writing a paper as easy as possible next research assignment.
            The WrAP assignment is a different story that mainly involves time management and limited planning. Since we only had two class periods to plan and write it, there was no way I would be able to make a successful above average grade. Of course, when the assignment had been graded a returned, organization was the lowest scored of all of the aspects. So, I still need to work on support or it will come back to get in later school years. I hope to resolve this issue in the near future. I feel it would greatly improve my writing grade.
            The highlight of writing in my year of English 1 was the Profile. I had made the highest grade on it out of all of the other papers. It is also the paper that showed my common error the involved keep the same perspective throughout the whole paper. Every paper throughout the year taught me another issue I had when writing. It seemed as if every different paper we wrote involved a different style of writing that challenged us to find new strengths and weaknesses.

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