Reflective Essay: How I Strengthen My Writing Class

Being born in a family that has a love for mathematics, I was not exposed to writing that much when I was younger, and as I grow up, I tend to stay away from anything that has to do with writing. Therefore, my skills were lacking compared to other people. Even though I did not have the worse grades in Writing class, I still did not consider my essays to be well written. However, the two writing courses in USciences, which are WR 101 and WR 102, have helped me a lot in strengthening my writing skills. Three of the papers that I wrote within this first year of college are: Literacy Narrative, Editorial, and Long Argument. These assignments showed how I grow as a writer throughout the year as I learned how to write different types of papers.

In this assignment, I compared the differences in opportunities between students who live on campus and who do not, and persuade upcoming freshmen to live in a dormitory. In high school, I did not really write any papers that aim to persuade other people so this assignment was hard at first. I did not know how to write an editorial, and what I should write about to attract people, especially college students. I finally came up with an idea to write about, which was persuading colleges to make dormitory a requirement for everyone. However, I got many negative feedbacks, such as “Why would you want to live on campus?” and “It costs a lot of money”. Therefore I changed my topic to just persuading the first year students to live on campus, instead of persuading the college. I made this change in the topic because I thought it would be better for the students to make choices for themselves. Again, peer reviewing was a great help because through my classmates, I got to know more about the disadvantage commuters have to face, such as that some commuters waste more than two hours traveling each day to and from school, and because of that, they did not get to study as much as they