Reflective Essay About My English Class

Upon registering for an English Class for winter quarter, I had one goal in mind: take the easiest English class I could, breeze through the class, boost my GPA, and finish my English prerequisite. Thankfully, this class did not fulfill that goal. As my first English class at the university, this class challenged the way I thought, and shed light on my strengths and weaknesses. In high school, I had a substantial amount of English experience under my belt, as I had taken all honors and AP English courses. While these classes provided a heavy workload, the essays that we wrote were not necessarily challenging. Most of the courses were straightforward and had a singular goal in mind, such as practicing writing effective English, and to learn to analyze compositions. These goals were mechanical and formulaic, and could be easily achieved by following a certain set of steps. Eventually, I

Through the assignments and discussion posts, I found that I have always had a difficult time putting my ideas into words. Because I used to subconsciously format my essays with the same methods of generating my claims, I realize that I had rarely generated unique ideas and writing styles. I reused ideas from past essays, and I did not practice articulating new ideas. Therefore, when I began writing for this course’s challenging prompts, I felt as though I could not communicate as effectively as possible. This weakness embodied itself through my writing, especially since many of the prompts revolved around the subjective topics of our personal identity and language use. However, I was determined to succeed in this class, and made it a goal to practice putting my claims into words by analyzing their function, reworking the idea, and reanalyzing it. While this process was tedious, I significantly improved my ability to develop my claims over the course of the