Stacy 1 Madeline Stacy ENG 1103 Dr.

Peter Blair 12/09/2013 In looking back at my adolescent writing, I see now that I have conquered many of my linguistic demons over this past semester. As the days passed in the Fall of 2013, Dr. Blair helped motivate me to become a better and more convincing writer. I was far more closed off as a writer when I began my journey into English 1103 as a first year student. I had only had a few AP English courses before this and had no clue what to expect. I think that I got lucky when blindly choosing Dr. Blair as my professor. He has taught me so much about writing style, the importance of drafts, but primarily he has taught me about inquiry. My writing style coming into the semester was fairly sloppy. I pretty much wrote exactly how I talk, which is only good in a handful of cases. My style is, I think, different from most people due to the fact that I say precisely what I think needs to be said at any given time. Writing rough drafts is to help you create a sense of what the paper is going to be about and aid you as merely an outline for your final draft. The necessity of these rough drafts is crucial to the writing process. When preparing for a paper, there are many steps to prevent an error from coming out in the final draft. The inquiry assignment is to get the writer to ask more questions about the topic and to delve as deeply as they can, much like a journalist. We are required to site sources and read our peers papers. The purpose of reading each others papers is so that you can read and discuss what may or may not be good changes. I learned in this course, how to convey my point with fewer words and also how to give descriptions down to the very last atom. In going into this course, I thought that my high school AP courses would have already done most of the workload and boy was I wrong. I learned far more from this course than I had ever imagined.

Stacy 2 My goals have changed in the fact that through this course, I have decided to become a journalist/columnist. I have discovered my love for words and the use of language and therefore am now set on a wonderful career path. In order for the class to get their papers up in motion, inquiry assignments and rough drafts were used as a tool to broaden our views and points about our topics. To me, the inquiry assignments and rough drafts were an essential procedure. Had we not done them, my view on writing would be similar to what it was whenever I began this course.