Week 1_1/15/16_Previous Writing Experiences

Emily Broj

My past writing classes in high school were relatively interesting, but were not as informative. I took four years of English in high school, but most of them stressed more literature aspects and analyzing writing as opposed to actually writing.

However, there were some positive experiences that I enjoyed from taking these classes. I really enjoyed writing research papers. For me this allowed me to learn new information and state my own ideas about the topic in a way that was interesting and informative to the reader. I found that writing different styles of papers not only helped me to learn different ways of writing, it also helped me to understand the audience that I was supposed to be catering to.

On the other hand, there were some negative experiences that I did not enjoy as much. I found that trying to write an essay in a timed setting is not my strong suit. Every so often in high school, we would have to write full essays in one class period, and be graded on our structure, grammar, punctuation and style. I found this most difficult because I work better writing a rough draft and then revising my grammar and structure for the final copy.

Honestly, I am finding it hard to remember any specific instruction that I have received in a writing class. As I mentioned, I took many years on English classes, but I think only one of them truly focused on writing styles, where as the others were more focused on analyzing writing. The most instruction I received about writing had to deal with voice and your presence within a paper. My teacher always said that style was just as important as proper grammar in your paper.

Something that I found to be beneficial in that writing class was that my teacher would always show us examples of different writing and writing styles, and then we would have to examine the work and see what we would change or correct in the paper.

Something that I struggled with in that class was structure in my writing. I never really knew how to start my papers, or the basic rules of how many sentences should be in a paragraph or how a thesis statement should be structured, or how to end the conclusion in the paper.

So far in college, there hasn’t been too much writing expected from me, most of my classes last semester had us do first person writing, or short reflections. However, in my health care ethics class, we had to write a ten-page case analysis with multiple sources. I found this to be slightly challenging because there was no instruction, there was just a topic to choose from. This was definitely different from high school because we always had more guidance when we were asked to write something.

To be brutally honest, I don’t think that the rhetorical efficacy of those classes were at the best level they should have been. I had performed relatively well in my writing, however based on other standards I don’t know that my writing would have been up to par.

I am hoping that this class will give me the instruction that I need to be able to feel confident in my writing and to be at a high proficiency level to excel in my other courses.