Reflective Essay: Writing For Competence Course

“I Can Write!”

Writing for competence, what does it mean and why is it important? Exactly my thought when my advisor reminded me the “Writing for Competence” course is required to move forward in the School for New Learning program. In my opinion, as a successful student and professional in the workforce, my writing skills were acceptable. In truth, I did not view my writing skills as a core competency making enrollment a daunting task. Turns out, the course opened my eyes to a whole new world and I achieved my writing goals of improving structure, creativity and grammar. In addition, I embraced the process of drafting, revising, editing, proofreading and incorporating feedback developing my academic and professional writing capabilities. My journey through the writing process has taken me from novice to capable of demonstrating all five L4 academic and professional competencies. My original expectation of the course was improving the structure of my writing. For me that meant the ability to organize sentences, edit and ensure

Evidence of this can be found in the ePortfolio I created as a repository for my essays, providing access from drafts to final revisions. Although my writing was not poor at the beginning of the course, my ability was limited. For the sake of level setting, I would define “limited” as the basic ability to apply conventions of spelling, punctuation, capitalization and grammar. Early feedback received from my instructor and peers included the improper use of tense, capitalization and punctuation. Until I received feedback to remain consistent with past and present tense, I was oblivious of those errors. That feedback highlighted the benefit of peer review, thus I make a conscious effort to review my writing for tense before requesting a peer review. Once I integrated the feedback the flow and readability of my essays drastically