Throughout the year my english career had its ups and downs. I started as a young and naive student, never taking into consideration my syntax, and not even glancing at what my diction was like. Soon, I realized that all of these things were important and I went from getting average grades on essays to high A’s. I started noticing run on sentences, poor word choice, and way too much comma placement. My writing took a turn for the best, I had my fellow students help me improve, instead of them just outright editing my essays for me. This in turn helped me improve and made me the writer I am today. One of my first ever essays in the 11th grade english class was a rhetorical analysis of the novel In Cold Blood. I notice now that I tend to repeat certain words, repeating “cold-blooded killer” every other sentence. This creates sentences which sound awkward. This could also be attributed to my poor sentence structure. I tended to change from past to present tense throughout my sentences (I still do this …show more content…
They would first just comment on the various writing I did in class, pointing out the flaws in my writing. This helped me a largely because I could directly see where I messed up, then quickly change it. Another large help was actually paying attention in class. I began to incorporate many of the rhetorical devices which we learned about. Using imagery to bring a new life to my writing. I began to actually understand what metaphors were and incorporated them in my essays. By listening to Mrs. Jackson during class I began to learn more about grammar. The few lessons which we had improved my writing a lot, just going over how a verb should interact with a noun in a sentence helped. Most of all though, the thing that helped me the most was practice. Writing essays over and over again, editing for hours on end improved the way I wrote a huge amount. The more I wrote the more I began to see