Personal Narrative: My Expectations Of A Writing Class

To say my expectations for this class were not met exactly would be true, but unfair because my ideas on what this class would be were completely different from what the class entailed. Knowing the name of the course, Writing and Thinking, I thought I would be taking Advanced Placement Literature and Composition 2.0. I fully expected to be reading and writing all the time – reading important literature, analyzing, researching, expanding my professional writing skills, and writing papers almost weekly.

I was not particularly excited for this class considering writing is by biggest stressor. Having a class with writing in the name was daunting on top of the heavy workload of a major in music education. I entered the first class with new knowledge

I had planned on reading classic literature and writing essays about said literature. When I was first introduced to the zombie curriculum, I was unsure of how watching zombie films would enhance my skills as a writer, aside from exploring symbolism in films; which previous high school English classes had taught me. More than anything in this class, I wanted to become a better writer at the collegiate level and hone in on important skills I would need to write professionally. Some of that expectation was met, while parts of it were

Resources were my best friend in this course; I was able to better understand what I was reading and be provided with new perspectives. I understood that it was completely fine to use these resources in my paper if I cited my source. Using resources was also essential to add new ideas to the information that I found on the internet. This was not a hard task and the analysis I read sparked new thought on the works we read for class.

Specifically, when writing my essay on feminism in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I found a couple of resources that studied allegory and feminism in not only the book, but also the movie version of this story. This helped establish more ideas and connect them to my prior knowledge on the subject.

Prewriting also became one of the essential advice I gathered from the writing process. Organizing essays ahead of time made my life and time writing easier. Before taking this class, I would make some sort of general outline including a thesis and main ideas I was going to cover in each paragraph, but I was never asked to do an outline in depth and talk it over before writing my rough draft. Writing out the main idea, analysis, and evidence for each point in my essays was incredibly helpful in formatting my papers and made an easy transition from