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Joey Nguyen
Professor Ditch
English 113A
8 December 2015
My Experience in College Writing
After graduating from high school, I was really excited to be in college. However, I was
not looking forward to take English again. Back in high school, I had never enjoyed any of the
English classes that I have taken. This is partly because I grew up never liking to read or write;
whenever I voluntarily try to do either, I always ended up not finishing the book or a literary
piece that I was trying to write. Being placed in English 113A, a remedial writing course, I
thought that it would not be much of a challenge for me. Yet, it is the opposite of what I thought
of. During high school, I did pretty okay on my writing assignments, and I thought that I was
actually prepared for college level writing. However, I was totally wrong; I found the
assignments that I have received in this class to be much more difficult and challenging. These
assignments required me to put a lot more effort into them, such as re-reading the texts multiple
times, as well as annotating them and understanding the article/ text as a whole. During the
beginning of the semester, I could barely keep up with the pace of the assignments, and I felt that
my writing was really terrible. As the time went by, I have gotten a lot more used to college
writing, and see I how actually improved as a writer.
It is really important to write an effective argument. As the core of the essay, an argument
has to be clear and insightful, as well as answering the prompt. In the first Progression, I had a
very weak argument, and it was not maintained throughout the essay. For my argument, I wrote:
gender roles create a big impact on influencing the way people thinks about others in our

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society (Progression 1). This results into a very general idea, and there is not really a specific
route for me to use for the entire essay. For this reason, my entire essay was fragmented, as the
paragraphs were disconnected from the main argument.
Nevertheless, in my second Progression essay, my writing skills has definitely improved,
which allowed me to write a much better argument than my first Progression essay. For the
second essay, my argument was: This new standard affects young women and girls
subconsciously into believing that this is how they are supposed to look and act. Although not
all, a lot of these females are conforming to the gender performance that media or society
expects them, instead of trying to be themselves, and this creates a problem. This time I notice
that my argument is much clearer and more specific than my first essays argument, this gives a
good direction of where I should go, which helps me sustain the argument consistently
throughout the entire essay. Even though my first essay was absolutely terrible, as I did not have
a specific idea to go with, I significantly improved in my second essay.
Analysis was something I also struggled with in my first Progression essay. In my first
essay, all I did was summarizing the texts from the two articles, and giving my thoughts about
the topic. However, after receiving my paper back, I realized that what I did was not an analysis
at all. Here is an example, Girls are usually treated with a lot more care than boys, and parents
tend to be rougher and more aggressive with boys. As children grow up to a certain age, their
parents will let boys hang out without caring much about them, and more protective towards girls
by looking out for them more often (Progression 1). As you can see, there is no evidence that
helps supporting the text, as well as an explanation for it. From this mistake, I have learned that
in order to write an effective analysis, I would have to present my ideas/ texts first, then provide
evidences, and explain them at the end.

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In the second Progression, I was able to improve in analyzing my texts. Instead of
creating a summarization, I developed my analyses using the quotation sandwich method.
Although this method was taught during the first Progression, I have never really thought about it
until my second paper. By using the quotation sandwich, I was able to have an easier time
creating analysis throughout my essay. For example, In the previous generations, the standard of
being a good women was to be a good cook, cleaner and mother (Dines 256). However
nowadays, all it takes to be a good women is just being a good lay (Dines 256), in other words,
to look fuckable (Dines 253) (Progression 2). As a result, my writing has improved since I
now know how to create a proper analysis.
Although I have yet to become a good writer, my writing has definitely improved
throughout the semester by taking this class. I was able to learn a variety of new materials in
regards to writing, such as the quotation sandwich, rhetoric, proper MLA format, etc. At first,
this class was very challenging, especially when transitioning from high school. The workload
here was a lot more than what I had back in my high school English classes. However, I am very
glad that I took this class because without it, I would have been much more unprepared for my
upcoming classes in college.
Ultimately, I felt that this class was extremely helpful for my growth as a writer. I am
really thankful for having Professor Ditch and the SI (Teagan Fish) for helping become a better
writer. Even though English is still yet to be a fun subject for me, I am hoping that I will be able
to enjoy it in the future.