Writing Reflection for English I

Anna Lee Ingold

Dr. deGravelles

Block 4

May 1, 2012

Writing Reflection for English I

            Freshmen year has been a very growing experience for me, writing wise. I’ve learned a lot of different things that I will be able to use for the rest of my high school career. This year in English has definitely been hard but I know that it has taught me a lot about writing techniques and I know that I will be prepared for the years to come.

            One of the first papers we had to do was the literacy narrative and I have to say it was probably my favorite. I really liked talking about my childhood in it and I also think it was probably the easiest but one of my problems with it was my word choice; I tended to use the same word a lot.  Details were also another problem. I should have given a few more. I also need to work on my transitions and try to stop repeating the same ones. For the Profile I had trouble with punctuation, I tended to put too much information in one sentence. I also didn’t have enough indirect characterization.

            I have to say that the Literary Analysis was probably one of the hardest papers we did but I feel like it helped me grow the most in my writing. I know it wasn’t one of my best and I wish I would have worked harder in trying to explain my ideas better. My support wasn’t very clear and I didn’t have enough of it. One of the last papers and one of the biggest was the global issues paper. It was probably the hardest but I actually enjoyed researching the information about it. I was really proud with my organization but I needed to work on really explaining my quotes, sources and information. But like I said at the beginning for the literacy narrative I overused a lot of words. For the WrAP test I think I did pretty well for the amount of time we had. I feel like maybe I could have had more support, which was one of my lowest scores.

            The feedback was very helpful for me because I messed up on different things for each paper. Mostly it was just wrong punctuation and not enough supporting evidence. I’ve always had trouble with the correct punctuation and how to split up sentences so hopefully I can learn to do that better.

            For the next year and the rest of high school I really hope that I can develop better writing skills such as longer papers and being able to use punctuation correctly. I think I just need to take more time to make an outline and really plan out my whole paper/essay. I think that would make a big difference. I also think I should start to use a thesaurus to get bigger words because I overuse words a lot in transitions, etc.

            Overall this year has been a very growing experience for my writing skills and I have learned a lot of techniques. I hope I can continue to use these for the rest of my school career. It’s been hard but I know I have learned a lot.

Common Errors List

-        Overused words

o   Word choice: Global issues paper

-        Comma splices

-        Conventions

-        Sentence fluency

-        Transitions, etc.

-        Support

o   Ideas in Global issues paper

-        organization