Reflection

            Since the first day that I walked into my English 103 class I have watched all aspects of my writing get refined and change. The process that I follow when writing a paper has sorted itself out and made itself much clearer, and in turn has caused the final product to be much cleaner.

            For the first two papers that I wrote for this class there wasn’t much behind the process that I followed to begin writing. I would simply sit down, open a word processor, and begin to spill my thoughts down on paper. I did this because I wrote with the thought this is ONLY a first draft. While a first draft is a time to try new things and experiment, I used it to delay putting any thought into my work. It was through the group reviewing sessions that I started to realize the importance of pre-writing. If I did not put effort into a draft then the discussion about my paper while in a peer group was useless and made my work look poor. Currently when I know I have to write a paper I will do a five minute free write and then separate what I wrote into groups. I will then use this as a base for my first draft. This has helped me with improving the flow of my papers.

            The other issue that I had when I first began this class is all my papers would be very wordy for the sake of filling up space. Now that I do a pre-write before every draft I no longer find myself rambling on about non-sense and trying to fit in as many adjectives as I can into one sentence. Now that my papers are much more organized I find more places to add detail because there are now sections in my work instead of one big mess of words.

            As an author I have also started to pay attention to who my audience will be and then gear the writing toward them. For example if I know that my audience will be the entire academic community of DePaul then I know that I do not need to write a paper that explains everything in excruciating detail because I can assume that they are knowledgeable and do not need to be spoon fed everything. I may also choose to relate a particular part of my essay to something at DePaul and therefore draw the reader’s attention toward my essay. Also, if I am writing a narrative about a past experience and my audience is my fellow peers then I can add some personal details in my essay without much explanation assuming that my peers have a slight idea as to the type of personality that I possess.

            I have also found certain aspects of my writing that still need attention. The most important aspect is imagery. While only one of my essays required this, my narrative, I still discovered that more can be done to bring the reader into the essay. By adding imagery into my papers I believe that I can make the reader feel more a part of the paper and therefore focus more attention on reading it. If I do not include imagery then the reader may feel it does not concern them and then not continue to read it.

            I feel that I have improved on many parts of my writing and while I am not yet the perfect writer I do feel that I am better that the person who walked into the class three months ago.