Over the course of this semester I have completed and experienced things that I have never done in the past. I think that this class has opened my eyes to new things and has showed me that I can do more things than I thought that I could. I think that writing letters each month, writing summaries and short exercises in my journal, turning away from the screen and writing longhand, and writing a literacy narrative have all helped me and bettered me with my writing.
Composing letters is not something that is very common today and is not something that I had a lot of experience in. At the beginning of the semester when we were told that we had to write a letter to someone each month, at first I thought that it was pointless. After actually taking the time to write the letters I realized that they really did help me with writing and especially helped me whenever I had to write a professional letter to judges and my mentor for my senior project. I also realized that the person who received my letters really loved and appreciated them.
Writing summaries and short exercises in my journal was also something that I struggled with at first. I was not used to having to summarize a lot of long articles and stories and I had trouble knowing what to include and not to include in my summaries. I also doubted my my writing abilities and always wanted to know what others thought about the things that I wrote. After reading the short story We Are All Quants Now by Paula Marantz Cohen I realized how the world, including myself, tends to think in quantitative terms. In this text a little girl is asked how she feels about a drawing that she was working on and she responds, “I’m not sure, I’ll bring it to school and see how many ‘likes’ I get” (Cohen). This really hit me and I realized that we all care way too much about what everyone else thinks of us and our accomplishments. I now try to have more confidence in myself and try to make decisions and opinions based on what I think. Even though reading and summarizing these articles were difficult and time consuming, I realized that my summaries kept getting better and better as we started to write more and I feel better about my writing. This not only helped me to write essays for this class but it also helped me to write papers for other classes, especially my AP English class.
Even though we have did a lot of writing in this class, I would consider my literacy narrative to be my most significant work in the course. I think that planning, drafting, and revising my literacy narrative has aided my development as a writer. Writing my literacy narrative allowed me to look back and appreciate the things and people that have made me who I am as writer and has helped me to see how I have improved. In my literacy narrative I wrote about the AP English class that I took last year and how it helped prepare me for the AP English class that I am taking this year. I think that having to write my literacy narrative longhand helped me to organize my paper better and helped me come up with more ideas to write about. If it wasn’t for writing this literacy narrative, I probably wouldn’t have given this idea much thought.
I think that this class has definitely helped me and encouraged me to write more. It has also helped me with critical thinking and knowing what is important in different writings. I think that writing letters each month, writing summaries and short exercises in my journal, turning away from the screen and writing longhand, and writing a literacy narrative have all helped and bettered me with my writing.
Bullock , Richard, and Maureen Daly Goggin. The Norton Field Guide to Writings with Readings and Handbook.
