final reflection final portfolio dillon simpson

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Simpson 1 Dillon Simpson December 1, 2011 Ms. Caruso ENGL 1101 Final Reflection The semester is coming quick to an abrupt end. Throughout the past few months I have attempted to further my writing abilities. At the beginning of this semester I set goals for myself that I am going to reflect on and decided my goals were attainable through hard work and dedication. Although there have been times I have not been the hardest worker, I felt that I gave me best effort through the semester and have become a better writer as a result of it. The work I did for this class has helped me to achieve my overall goals. We had three main papers that focused on our writing. Out of the three main papers we did I felt that the genre recreation defense p aper was the most difficult. It was difficult because it took so much thought to formulate a good argument to defend your paper with. When it came to taking risks this semester, I thought I did an average job. I never tried to do anything out of my element, b ut I always did topics and subjects that I am familiar with. By taking this approach, I think it paid of well because it gave me a good median. As for playing it safe, I don’t think I did. I have made a v ast improvement on my writing since high school. It worked well for me by not playing if safe, but also by not doing anything out of my element. I grew as a writer and student by putting forth more effort on every paper.

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Page 1: Final Reflection Final Portfolio Dillon Simpson

8/3/2019 Final Reflection Final Portfolio Dillon Simpson

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Simpson 1

Dillon Simpson

December 1, 2011

Ms. Caruso

ENGL 1101

Final Reflection

The semester is coming quick to an abrupt end. Throughout the past few months I

have attempted to further my writing abilities. At the beginning of this semester I set

goals for myself that I am going to reflect on and decided my goals were attainable

through hard work and dedication. Although there have been times I have not been the

hardest worker, I felt that I gave me best effort through the semester and have become a

better writer as a result of it.

The work I did for this class has helped me to achieve my overall goals. We had

three main papers that focused on our writing. Out of the three main papers we did I felt

that the genre recreation defense paper was the most difficult. It was difficult because it

took so much thought to formulate a good argument to defend your paper with. When it

came to taking risks this semester, I thought I did an average job. I never tried to do

anything out of my element, but I always did topics and subjects that I am familiar with.

By taking this approach, I think it paid of well because it gave me a good median.

As for playing it safe, I don’t think I did. I have made a vast improvement on my

writing since high school. It worked well for me by not playing if safe, but also by not

doing anything out of my element. I grew as a writer and student by putting forth more

effort on every paper.

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Simpson 2

My writing has strengths and weakness throughout my works. I have noticed that

one of my strengths is finishing a paper in a short amount of time. I can knock out a

tough paper if you give me a few hours to finish it. However, now that I do revision and

closely examine all my work, I feel that it is so much easier to finish successfully. My

weakness is transition sentences and sentence structure. They have hindered me because

the paper doesn’t flow well together and sometimes my papers just sound weird. I combat

these weaknesses because of revision. It has become a habit of mine now to check over

my papers three or four times to make sure everything flows well together and sounds

good.

The main aspect of this class that helped me was all of the exercises and things we

did with our peers. It was very important to not only establish relationships, but also to

help others and have others help you with your writing. Everything we did almost had to

do with others. Rarely did we do anything where it was just ourselves. It just really

helped me to always have a second and third opinion on the majority of work we did.

My thinking has changed significantly since the start of the semester. I am now

very open minded to revision and peer review, whereas before I thought the only person

that could help me was my professor. I was very narrow minded and never thought I

needed help. At the beginning of the semester I thought this was going to be another

boring college class. Honestly, I thought I was going to go to class to get lectured on how

I needed to write better, and then sent home to write papers. Instead, everyday in your

class I enjoyed myself and in a fun way always learned something interesting that could

help my writing. I expected very little but came to find out my expectations became much

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Simpson 3

greater after going to class a few times. Most parts of my writing have changed and I

expect so much more out of the work I do now then I did before.

The two main papers we did this semester were the rhetorical analysis paper and

the genre recreation defense paper. On the rhetorical analysis paper, I thought I did a

good job with it and though my revision was well done. I deleted one huge paragraph that

I went off topic with and made the paper more clear and concise. This paper did not

require as much attention as my genre recreation defense paper. The genre recreation

defense paper that I first wrote I didn’t put much effort into it. For my revised paper, I

decided to change the entire paper. I cut out so much and added reasons to why, rather

then just writing facts. The revision had good sentence structure and flow. It also had

many grammatical errors and informal writing that was corrected. The whole defense

paper was redone in order to make it a successful revision.

Peer review was undoubtedly the most important thing to me this semester. As I

wrote before, just getting in a comfort zone with your peers and being able to rely on

them, gave me tremendous success. Helping others and being helped when you needed it

really became almost a vital tool used to be successful in this course.

In my literacy memoir and my midterm reflection I reiterated that the main way

for me to become a better writer is for me to strive to get a better work ethic and work to

the fullest of my potential. I truly felt that through the way you taught us, let us choose

subjects and topics that intrigued us, helped me to try that much harder. Everything I

wrote about I really enjoyed, I didn’t just feel like I was doing another boring paper that

was assigned to me. Just doing the little things, like focusing on sentence structure, flow,

and transition words, writing papers can be that much easier. I realized this semester that

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Simpson 4

through revision you could make everything so much easier on yourself. If you put forth

the effort, you can make yourself a better writer through hard work. My work ethic has

become so much stronger this semester and I plan for this to be a stepping-stone to follow

throughout college.