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Karina Santibanez

Professor Ward

ENG 111

24 April 2017

How I Survived My First College Writing Class

When I walked into English 111 in early January, I had no idea how much knowledge I

would gain in just a few short months. One of the basic things I learned this semester was

grammar rules that I probably should have learned how to apply back in middle school. Some of

the more advanced concepts I have learned in this class is how to write a thesis statement, and

how to synthesize at the end of my paragraphs. By taking this English class I have grown as a

write by improving my writing process, by expanding my critical thinking and writing skills, and

by learning how to appropriately cite, punctuate and apply most grammar rules into my writing.

In class all the essays we wrote had different topics, but there is one thing that all of the

essays had in common. The one thing that unites all the essay together is that they all followed

the same writing process: research, draft, peer review, revise, edit, and then turn in a final. Before

this class I would have just drafted an essay, revised and edited, and then turned in a final, but

from now on this old routine has changed. I have always been someone who writes all in her

books and everywhere on a reading passage, yet I realized that sometimes the comments I made

about my reading were not very relevant. Now when I read, I read with purpose and that is to

identify the important aspects of the reading, the figurative language, themes, etc. Another thing

that I found beneficial in this class was having peer reviews. Partaking in peer reviews helped me

see my writing through someone elses eyes. Receiving feedback from others is beneficial

because from my perspective I may have written a masterpiece, but in reality my writing may not
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be as great as I perceived it to be. Holding peer reviews also gives me a chance to hear the

suggestions that others have on ways to improve my writing as well as hear and see what

techniques they are using in theirs. Overall, becoming an active reader as well as allowing others

to give me feedback on my work has helped me grow as a writer because I am able to apply what

I have read more diligently into my writing, and because I allow others criticism of my writing to

help mold what I write.

Throughout grade school you always hear the famous word thesis, but how many of us

really learn how to apply it? I for one never gave much consideration into creating a wonderful

thesis statement because no one had ever emphasized the significance of the thesis statement in

an essay. With the numerous lectures heard about the thesis statement, I have finally started to

recognize the thesis statement as an important part of my essay and actually try to make it the

focal point of my essay. Along with learning how to create better thesis statements I have also

learned how to support the claims made in each paragraph. Where I still fall short in my writing

is synthesizing at the end of a paragraph because I fear I am being too repetitive. Truth be told,

synthesizing I now realize helps tie everything I stated in the paragraph back in, which is why I

tried to incorporate this more into my revised essays. The third essay specifically has more

synthesizing and analyzing of quotes in its revised version. This essay itself required me to

explain quotes and my thought process as to how the ideas of two pieces of writing compare and

contrast to one another. In my essay I compared the views on mental health in Lee Smiths

Dimestore and Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wallpaper.

Many of my fellow classmates stated that they wanted to improve their grammar when

we started the class. Just in some of the essays I peer edited I can say that we definitely needed

help with grammar when we started the class, but now I can say that we have come a long way.
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Grammar rules are not easy to memorize, in fact it is so hard to keep up with all the different

rules for all sorts of writing. I have never been a stickler about my writing, but as the class went

on I started trying to pinpoint my own grammar mistakes. My high school teachers usually just

made us use paperrater.com because it fixed all of our grammar mistakes, but now looking at

my graded final versions of my essays, and your [Professor Wards] comments, I can see that this

resource is probably not that great at detecting grammar issues. Because my peers also said they

struggle with grammar I was very hesitant to take their word on certain changes they would tell

me to make in my essays, which is why the Bedford Handbook became my best friend. I still

struggle with placing commas and semi-colons, but I have started to refer to the Bedford

Handbook whenever I have doubts on where these two should be placed. The Bedford Handbook

was very useful to me this semester when it came to citing sources in my essays. I use to use

Citation Machine and Easy Bib to cite my sources, but now thanks to the Bedford Handbook I

can just see how to manually type out a citation correctly in MLA format.

I choose to organize my portfolio by order of my least to best work in my opinion. The

first sheet after my table of contents is the thesis brainstorm we did in class when working on our

first essay. As shown, not much went into this planning because I was stuck not knowing what

my true idea of home was, but I did end up using a version of this statement in my essay.

Following my thesis brainstorm I placed my first essays draft, the final I turned in, and now the

revised version. Although I enjoyed writing about the idea of home, I do believe I did not

improve this essay as much as I should have. There were some suggestions that I did take into

consideration, but overall I liked how I had written my paper and did not want ot change much of

it. After all, this is MY idea of home, so I described it as best as I could. Following my first essay

documents I included The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman to show how I
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interacted with this reading. When flipping through the pages it can be noted that I deeply

indulged myself in the text by making comment, underlining, circling, etc. which in return

helped me when writing the third essay. The draft of this essay also has a significant amount of

marking all through it, but as seen in my revision I still made various changes to my final.

One of my biggest concerns in the class was that I would not be a great writer and get Cs

and Ds on my essays. Luckily though I was blessed to receive Bs on all of my essays thus far.

Part of the reason I know that my essays have not had terrible grades is because of the efforts I

made in this class. As mentioned before I have improved my grammar skills, I have improved

my writing process, and I have learned how to cite correctly. All of these new gained skills are

things I would have never even thought of doing before. Now that I have learned the basics of

these skills I can apply them to the rest of my college writing that I have left at Meredith. The

improvement of my writing process will help me prepare for my essay, plan out what I want to

write, and take advice from others when needed in order to create a college worthy essay. The

improvement of my grammar skills will help maintain the focus of my essay, will help there be a

clearer flow when the reader is reading, and will make me as the writer look credible in what I

am saying. Last, learning how to cite correctly shows my scholarly worth. By citing correctly

who ever reads my essay can go through the list of sources and see that they are credible sources

as well as further look into a reading that peaks their interest. All three of these lessons are

valuable to me because I can apply them even beyond my college writing, but they are also

important because they are three of the four goals that this English class has mentioned in the

syllabus. I know for a fact that this portfolio as well as this essay show that I have successfully

mastered at least these three goals, and can continue to work on the fourth goal.