Reflection Essay
I was never really good at English. I do like to read and write, but only creatively, not formally. There are only a few books out of the many I enjoyed being forced to read during my middle and high school career. Many essays I have written did not satisfy teachers as much I thought they would. It was very disappointing. I tried my hardest on the English APs and I could get only a 3 on both the Literature and Composition and Language and Composition tests. So, taking the lowest level English course entering college was a bit disheartening. However, it totally was not what I expected it to be. I thought I was going to be just reading books and writing essays about those books. However, this course was mainly focusing on writing and improving on how we write and express our ideas. This class was probably the second hardest class I have taken besides Chinese. It definitely was a huge challenge to get through. However, I feel that my overall writing has improved as well as the method to attempt to write has changed.
At the beginning of the semester, we learned about freewriting. It was a way of the gears in our minds moving to prepare ourselves for writing other assignments. This is where my talents are, as my professor commented on how I’m a very fluid writer. I am able to write about anything that’s on my mind. In my first freewrite assignment, I wrote over eight in less than an hour. I can also write reviews and reflections very easily. Take the Diana George response essay. That was a very easy process because I had to summarize and respond if her suggestion for Habitat for Humanity’s advertising was a good idea or not. The ideas came quick to me and I was able to write the essay with no problem. However, the trouble lies in when I have to write research papers and persuasive pieces. The mistake I made in the process essay was treating it like a freewrite at first, but I was supposed to showing change and development of my topic. It ended up being more of a diary entry than showing how manga changed my life. The research essay proved to be extremely difficult to me as well since I had to look at manga a different way and explain it as if the reader had no idea what I was talking about. I wrote it in a way where I thought the point was clear, but in fact that wasn’t. I learned to make things explicitly clear and to not assume the reader gets the point I am trying to make.
Another mistake I made would be judging an assignment before I actually do it.There was an assignment I have never done before, and it involved me writing a group essay. We were each assigned two partners and we had to visit the Frick Collection and write an essay by making a thesis about a room or piece of art in the collection. We had to rhetorically analyze our topic and collaboratively write an essay. In my reflection essay of the Frick paper, I wrote, “If there’s one thing you should know about me, it’s that I really I hate group projects. When group projects got be assigned in high school, I hated the fact that my grade was going to be based on someone elses (1).” However, at the end, when I thought throughout the essay, I said “I was very impressed with myself that I was able to write a pretty good collaborative essay with partners I really didn’t know well” (3). Clearly, I entered the project feeling very bitter but left it on better terms. Though this assignment was difficult, it wasn’t as terrible as I thought it was going to be. Another assignment was making a movie. We were asked to take our process essay thesis or research essay thesis and turn it into a film. I did my movie in “Draw My Life” style because I have seen a lot of YouTubers do it, and it would be the easiest thing to do. As I said in my Movie Reflection:
While doing this movie, I found that doing a “Draw My Life” video was a little harder than expected. I wanted the drawing to be done all in one shot, but I kept up messing it up and ended up having to split it in parts. When I did my voice-over, I did it by reading a script. Then I put the two together. I had to cut and edit a lot of things to make the voice sync up to the drawings. The first draft was fine, but I needed to do some changes with my voice over. I tried doing the voice-over again. But the editing was too difficult in the way where it would be a frame-by-frame editing. I attempted to do it, but was unsuccessful and my computer crashed. This caused a lot of frustration and I ended up not editing the draft since I was not skilled enough to do so. At first I thought it was going be easy video editing, but it turns out I was wrong. It was still fun doing it though. (Shao 2-3)
Clearly, I had trouble with the movie-making process that I did not intend. However, it was still my favorite assignment because I enjoy making and editing simple films.
My writing style and how I approach writing has changed a bit since high school. In high school, I never really wrote multiple drafts. I would just write the assignment and then edit it and figure it was good enough. I wrote in a Transition way. However, in college I found I was writing more in a Process way because of the type of essays we were assigned. I found myself writing more drafts and even completely changing my ideas and always starting fresh. Eventually, I would get to where I wanted to go in a way where other people could see my process in how I got to my conclusion. Anne Lamott’s “Shitty First Drafts” excerpt helped me a lot in changing the way I write. She says, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something -- anything -- down on paper” (2). In her piece, she explains that making a shitty first draft is key to developing the polished, finished paper. Writing multiple drafts was something I really didn’t think of because I thought it was a waste of time. However, after reading her piece, I tried writing multiple drafts and found it worked a lot. Especially since this class required multiple drafts to be submitted. It was challenging thing to do at first since the first essay, the process essay, had to be split into three drafts. When I wrote the first one, I found it was fine. When my professor commented on it, took his suggestions and wrote the middle draft. I just edited it as if it were my final draft where I would splice here and there, add and remove things. When my professor’s comment on my middle draft came along, he said it was like the first draft I submitted. I realized that I had not changed much and it needed to be fixed a lot. So, my final draft, I tore my paper apart. It ended up being really developed and clearer than my other two drafts. I connected thinking and writing where instead of transmitting ideas that I already had, I explored the topic and developed my thoughts over time. However, this method was harder for the research essay. Since I have written research essays on scholarly topics, writing one about causation in the manga world proved difficult. I used the Transmission method in that essay because it was easier for me just write about the thoughts I’ve already concluded in my mind.
Overall, I would saw this course definitely gave me obstacles that I had to overcome. While doing that, however, I learned a lot about different forms of writing and how I can use those to shape my essays, or even creative stories. I learned that depending on the type of essay I write, I can choose different methods to write them. I found that in the beginning I was more of a Process writer, but I found writing research papers I can use the Transmission method while writing process and discovery papers I can use the Process method. Despite the constant complaining I did and the stress these assignments caused, I think it has definitely helped me with finding a good way to write essays. Hopefully I can successfully use the skills I have learned in this class while writing future papers.