15/15/2023

Joshua Adames

Essay Reflection and Dissection

People improve skills given time and guidance with improvement occurring naturally through trial and error and artificially using the guidance of others. This class has assisted me in training my writing skills significantly through the amount we write and all the advice we obtain in class. This class truly was a delight and helped me immensely. Without further ado, this is the story of my writing journey.

Within this class, we covered many common issues with writing and how to solve them. We also examined our styles and how to improve them I will be detailing how I developed utilizing our class objectives. The first objective of our class is “Students will examine how attitudes towards linguistic standards empower and oppress language users.” I interpreted this objective to have me examine how I view language used in writing, how it may affect the reader’s perception of the author, and what standards we should use to judge our work. Within my first few pieces, you can see how formal my writing style is with high school and earlier having taught me how to write an essay simply to get a good grade by being formal and using long words. It was a kind of soulless writing where I would just go through the motions to obtain a grade I considered acceptable. After we talked about writing styles I began to reconsider how I wrote rereading my work and finding it boring to myself I decided to simplify it to make it easier to read and began using more metaphors. I made it closer to how I think and how I write for myself with my poetry and notes. This improvement made my writing flow better and feel more alive as a whole. This class helped me let my voice out and combine it with the purpose of the writing teaching me to let my voice flow in a more formal tone rather than emotional. 

The second objective “Explore and analyze, in writing and reading, a variety of genres and rhetorical situations.” Was easy for me to fulfill due to how much I already read and daydreamed of fake situations. Though the class did help me better put what I analyzed into words with me being exposed to more writing through discussion posts and being made to put my often chaotic and sporadic thoughts that run through my head into fluid sensible sentences.  This objective ties into the first in helping me better utilize my voice.

The third objective is “Develop strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing.” Directly connected to the fourth “Recognize and practice key rhetorical terms and strategies when engaged in writing situations.” And the fifth is “Engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes.” The ability to read my classmates’ work utilizing their posted drafts gave me something to compare my writing to directly which helped me recognize different types of writing. This would lead to me analyzing their writing which would help me develop strategies since they would often talk about their strategies. That combined with my being able to freely access the drafts they posted helped me make strategies that work for me, recognize terms, and when talking in class helped me engage in the social aspects of writing by correcting each other’s drafts along with offering ideas to assist one another.

The sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth objectives all pertain to either the use of the internet, the examination of sources, or the integration of ideas or citations. I find these 4 ideas to be interconnected quite deeply with them all improving over time through the guidance given to us within class. The school library and the internet, in general, allowed me access to many sources, and the teachings given to us within the class on how to examine sources allowed me to find what was credible. This led to me having many examples of several stances and the differing ways they were able to integrate their ideals and stances into their writing. As I incorporated this into my writing I got better at examining ideas of sources which helped me only pit myself against strong arguments and also only use stronger evidence. With what I have learned about citations it allowed me to properly credit those I used to improve though I still have a lot of work to do when it comes to in-text citations since I often forget to add them just leaving the links at the end most commonly.

I know my essay seems quite vague about my improvements but due to how they are about the deepness and voice of the writing I do implore readers of this to examine my writings themselves to see these changes and come to their conclusions. At the bottom of this paper will be a link to my portfolio in its entirety. Writing like any other skill is art so your perception may differ from mine but do always remember as with any art practice makes perfect so always polish your writing and don’t fear critique.