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Jared Cranz

Professor Ditch

English 115

3 December 2017

My Growth as a Writer

As a first year in college, I had expected there to be a large jump in the grading system of

essays compared to that of high school. Even so, I would end up procrastinating with my Project

Space final essay. I was fairly confident in my own writing skills so I figured it would be alright

to wait and then write an essay that I believed to be worthy of at least an A- on the high school

grading scale. Despite my confidence, I would receive a huge kick to my ego when my score on

the final draft was a seventy-two percent; at the bottom of average. Despite this being the class

average, I had figured that if I turned in something that would have gotten me a high grade last

year then I would receive a decent grade in college. This realization would knock some sense

into me and show me that I would need to make improvements to pass the class. Over the rest of

the semester, I would continue to refine my writing and make less mistakes which was shown in

my next essay, Project Text, when I had received a much higher score than that of Project Space.

It is due to the constant improvement of what I had believed to be good writing skills, that I can

say that I have grown as a writer over the course of this semester.

Project Space served as a wake-up call for me. My seventy-two percent really left a bad

feeling in my chest and I really didnt understand why I had received such a low score for what I

believed to be a solid essay. Though my mistakes would become a lot clearer to me after reading

my professors notes that she had left on my final draft. My professor had pointed out that my
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thesis was unclear due to the fact that it does not answer the prompt entirely. After reading my

thesis statement, I had only answered two of the three questions with a vague argument about

them. Seeing this, I would re-write my thesis in the draft I used in my final portfolio. The new

thesis I had wrote was a much more clear one which does answer the prompt, unlike the previous

one. Another important issue was that I did not use textual evidence in a majority of my Project

Space essay. To fix this I had removed some of my rambling which tends to show up in my

writing and replaced it with sentences that relate more to the theme and argument of the essay

itself. Still, it surprised me how I had received that score even though I lacked textual evidence,

so I concluded that my syntax and diction was not the issue and would try to leave the more

sophisticated details of my essay alone while still adding more details to it. Adding said details

allowed for my conclusion to become valid rather than the conjecture it was at first. These

improvements I have made to my Project Space essay are but one of the many improvements that

show my growth as a writer.

Following Project Space was Project Text, in which the subject of my analysis was an

epistolary novel rather than my experience within a space. When I had written my essay for

Project Text, I was sure that I had used much more textual evidence to support my main

argument. In the final draft my thesis was very clear yet it was not always like this. One of the

assignments for Project Text was to bring an essay proposal to my professor and discuss what

needs work on it. One of the main issues with my essay was that the thesis was unclear because I

had worded it in such a way where it could possibly answer the prompt in two different ways.

After noticing this, I revised my thesis and tried to cut all of the babble from my text, leaving

only what was relevant and straight to the point. This is one of the things that has demonstrated

my growth because on my graded copy, my professor had left a note saying the thesis was clear.
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Even so, there were many things I was able to change in my final essay. After all, my score on

that wasnt a one hundred percent so I did have errors. In my final draft I had tried to fix my tone

a little and elaborate a little bit more on the unclear details that were in my body paragraphs.

As previously mentioned, there were various flaws specific to both of my project essays

although there were a few flaws that both essays had. In both of my essays, I had noticed that I

had MLA format issues such as not using hanging indents in my work cited page and that I was

italicizing articles that I had used for resources rather that using quotation marks like I should

have been doing. Another formatting error I had was how I would underline the title of my

essays. These format errors were fixed in the final drafts I would use in my portfolio. Although

they were fixed in my portfolio, I would not make that same mistake in the previous project:

Project Media. When I had turned in my final draft of my Project Media essay, I had made sure

that my mistakes I had made in the first two projects would not carry over to that one. In its own,

the ability to identify my past mistakes and prevent myself from making them again in my

writing shows a clear growth in my writing skills.

To sum it all up; I have learned that the college grading scale requires more effort and

attention that that of the high school grading scale I was accustomed to. My mistakes I had made

in my first project essay would set me on the path of improving on my own writing which was

shown by my higher score in my Project Text essay. The mistakes I made, both major and minor,

had really impacted my final grade on my essays and I have taken away many skills that I will

use to make sure that I do not repeat those mistakes in the essays to come. My continuous

improvement among my essays clearly shows my growth as a writer and that I have taken away

the skills I need to continue to improve on my writing skills as I move forward to higher level

English classes in which the grading standards are higher. My time in this class has shown that if
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I had taken away one thing, it was the philosophy that all of those who aspire to become great

writers should practice. That philosophy being kaizen, and it is one that I will continue to

practice for my years as a student and many more to come.