Reflection

When I first walked into this English 1101 class, I was nowhere close to the writer that I now am. This English class has taught me many different skills and techniques. One of the first things that I started doing is prewriting. When teachers talked about this in High School I didn’t think that it was important and would usually skip over that step. Now since in college we are assigned lengthy papers, prewriting is an important step to writing a paper. Before I start to write, I now, write down all my ideas on a piece of paper, usually in cluster form. I look back to this paper for help during my entire writing process. The story that we read in class “Shitty First Drafts” helped me a lot because now I know that my first draft doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s easier to write down everything first and then revise later and decided what to keep and what to take out. In high school, I usually only wrote one draft and that was the one that I turned in. I was never taught before, that writing multiple numbers of drafts could help you. This has definitely helped my papers. I now rewrite parts of my paper over and over until I’m sure that it’s perfect. Once I finish writing and am close to being complete, I go through the entire paper once again. I check each individual sentence to make sure that the structure is right and if there is anything that I could change to simplify. I had never heard of simplifying my sentences before this class and taking out unneeded words has helped clean up my compositions. After I do this, I then ask a friend to go through the paper and check for any grammatical airs that I might have missed. My paper is then complete! This class has helped me so much with writing, which I know will help me in all my future classes here at FSU.