Reflective Essay: What I Learned In My Writing Class

In the beginning of this semester you asked us how we feel about writing, and I can honestly say I loathed it. However, I now know that I simply did not understand what writing does. In brief, writing is a vital way of expressing and sharing new ideas in hopes that it will educate someone or shape their opinions. For most of my English education I have been assigned essays that have been written hundreds of times before, and my ideas have been said before. As a result, I would write in a way that was quick and effective. Consequently, I was not thinking about what I was writing and just wrote whatever I felt the teacher would like. This changed once I had to write the assignments for this class. The assignments for this class required me to genuinely think when I was writing because there was no clear answer or argument that I had to write about. For this reason, I now look at each aspect of writing differently and the process of writing my research paper shows how I have changed my strategy of writing.

When creating an outline, I would take all of the information that I had and basically write a concise paper that only needs to be put into essay format. As a result, I was not genuinely participating in the process of writing, but instead just taking information and putting into essay format. Consequently, when writing the research paper, I had great difficulty getting it started because I was unable to do the outline I usually do. This was because when writing a research paper like the one that was assigned to us one does not know all of the information they need when they begin the paper because there is more learned as the paper grows. When I attempted to do an outline, it limited the amount of information that I was putting into my research paper because at that time I had no idea as to what the logistics of what I was trying to say