Kali Mitchell
English 1101
Professor Elliott
7 December 2012
Reflective Final Essay

This first semester of my freshman has been a very interesting trip. I have learned so much in the short amount of time that I have spent here at Kennesaw State University. I feel as if I have grown, not only as a student, but as a person as well. I have met many new people, made many new friends, and learned many new things especially in my English 1101 class. I thought I knew everything there was to know about writing when I came in on my first day, but I was very wrong. My professor assured me that there is much more to writing than just putting words down on paper. Knowing all of this, I have now learned how to improve on my writing skills, how to write better grammatically correct sentences, incorporate quotes and research and give as well as get criticism. When I came into this semester as a freshman I was very confident in the quality of my writing. However, my self-esteem was soon crushed shortly thereafter. Even though my writing skills had been very good compared to my classmates in high school, at the university level they were just average. After hearing about the on average grades students get in professor Elliott’s class, I knew I had a lot of work to do to receive an A on a paper. I had to do something quick to learn how improve on my writing skills. With the help of my teacher, she made us a read a variety of articles that were very interesting, yet also very insightful and helpful at the same time. One article that really stood out to me was called “Engfish.” In high school, teachers tend to get really impressed if you have really big words in a paper, but when you incorporate such large words, you tend to start losing your argument and start talking about nothing. After reading about “Engfish and having these helpful hints my professor threw my way, I believe that I am writing the best papers that I have ever written in my life. I have made tremendous improvements and strides on my writing skills. I am anticipating the beginning of next semester when I take English 1102, because I cannot wait to see my writing skills improve again. When writing, it is very important that your sentences are grammatically correct. Nothing can ruin a paper faster than a couple of incorrect grammatical errors. I was good about not making any grammatical errors in my papers in high school that I knew of, but at the college level, there were many more rules I had yet to learn. After a couple of papers and some pretty high grades on them, Professor Elliott needed to talk to us about commas. Knowing me, I use them all the time, but probably in the wrong places. She showed us a website that was very helpful on deciding where commas should and should not be and how to prevent comma splices. After a day of class, a lot of listening and practice with commas, I felt as though I was the expert on it! Thanks to my helpful professor, I was able to pick up on these new and strange errors and able to recognize them and correct them so I can carry that knowledge with me into English 1102. In English 1101, I had to incorporate a lot of quotes and paraphrases into almost every one of my papers, and it was the biggest dilemma I faced all semester. Every time I got a paper back with quotes or with any kind of research in it, big bold letters at the top said: “watch out for accidental plagiarism!” I still have a lot of work to do with research because I still do not fully understand the concept of citing sources. In my Hall of Fame essay as well as my visual analysis, I struggled with sources and citing them, which started to undermine my ethos a writer. I am going to be practicing all Christmas break on lead-ins and parenthetical citations to ensure that I become an expert by the time I take English 1102 next semester. When giving and getting criticism it is really important to be open minded. I was one of those people when I started writing to not take anything my peers were saying because I thought my writing was the best and nothing could make it better. Wow, was I wrong! At a college level, the most important thing to make sure you listen to is the criticism of the other students. I know I did not and although my first paper was good, all the others from there on out were just average. Listening to what they had to say made me realize that some sentences that made sense in my head did not make sense when someone was reading them, so I could correct those awkward sentences. Taking in all of this criticism during the rough parts of my paper really helped me realize that my rough drafts were rough for a reason and that they needed to be fixed. Having peer review definitely helped me and made the revising process that much easier.
In just one semester I learned so much about writing that I just cannot fathom it sometimes. Learning all of these new techniques really opened my mind up to a whole new kind of writing! Being able to know how to put a sentence together and use quotes and research correctly builds strong ethos for me as a writer. Also, learning things about my writing and how to improve it really helped me along the way to my successful first fourteen weeks of college English. I will forever cherish this first semester throughout my college career as an eye-opening experience and the re-birth of my writing career. I came into college as a girl that was writing basic and simple papers. Now, I am emerging into a woman that is writing sophisticated papers at an exceptional level.