reflective letter: rough draft 1

This quarter of Writing 101 was a very educational experience. I enjoyed having Craig as an instructor and I learned a lot of valuable information from him. The text that was required for this course was actually a very interesting and helpful aid for learning the rules and guidelines of writing well structured papers. At the very beginning of the quarter we started annotating documents and at first I thought that just meant highlighting, but I was wrong. Once I actually started adding little notes into the margins I started to learn more from the documents and texts that we were reading. I’m glad this program was set up the way it was because it was very helpful for me. I feel like I developed a lot of skills that I was missing in high school. Although I still have some work to do, I have come a long way since my sophomore year.

I have improved quite a bit from this course but I still have room for improvement. First off, I need to work on speaking up in class. Throughout the quarter I rarely contributed in class discussions and I regret that now. Speaking in front of large groups is just something I am not very comfortable with, but I will be working on that for the future. Also, I didn’t truly capture the correct format of a hook and thesis, like in my first and second essays. I wasn’t drawing the reader in; I was just jumping right into the actual topics for the papers. Another thing that I think I need to improve on in the future is annotating every document. At first I annotated all of the documents once I understood how to actually annotate. But then I started slacking off and just reading the documents and not annotating. This was really stupid on my part because the annotations helped me understand the documents better. So, in the future I will annotate everything that should be so I have a better understanding of the topic. I have some things to improve on but I think I did well on a lot of other things throughout this course.

I think I did better in this writing than any other writing class I have taken. I believe my writing quality has improved a lot since high school and I owe that to the “They say, I say” text book. The templates we had to integrate into our essays truly help my writing improve. Also, by using the templates, I feel that the content of my essays was of a much higher level than compared to papers I wrote in high school. Another thing that I think I did well throughout the quarter was getting all my work done on time. I don’t recall ever having a late assignment or skipping an assignment, which shows my responsibility. I very rarely missed class, so I was usually there and ready to learn. In class I was there to learn and pay attention to the instructors. I tried not to get distracted or doze off in the middle of lectures because I knew they were probably important to hear about. Also, whenever we were broken up to work in smaller groups, I think I worked really well with the people I was grouped with and we always got our assignments done when they needed to be done. I am proud of the way I worked throughout the quarter and I believe I did fairly well in this writing course.