My Growth Through EN 103
When you are a freshman in college, I think one of the most intimidating classes to take is probably the one you have taken most often in all your years of school: English. English should be easy, right? We started learning the subject way back in third grade. But the intimidation factor kicks in when you get to college because you realize that however you right papers in this class is probably how you will write them for the rest of your college career. Aka, if you don’t make the proper changes and fix your writing style now while in the class, you may have an extremely difficult time writing cohesive, functional papers in whatever subject classes you take. Personally, my own experience in English classes have not been a cakewalk. I have always been fairly decent at putting together papers that get across the point and purpose. Until I reached advanced placement English in my last year of high school.
That class was by far the hardest class I have ever taken and my first B in English. My teacher was harsh and only appreciated papers that saw things her way.
This left a bad taste in my mouth as far as English classes went. I was especially apprehensive about a college English course, because if it was anything like my AP class, which was supposed to mirror a college course, then I thought I was screwed. Fortunately, this semester with Miss Bone in English 103 exceeded my expectations. This class was engaging, meaningful, and still managed to improve my writing in important ways. Not only did it strengthen my ability to develop a quality thesis in a paper, but it gave me practice in using the proper organization in to support my theses. This class also, with its focus on the intersects of Asian culture in America, really gave me a strong knowledge base on interesting facts having to do with asian countries, something I knew almost nothing about before. I do know that my writing style is still far from perfect, especially when it comes to implementing my own voice in papers, but overall I believe that I have improved as a writer and this class has a lot to do with that. Hopefully I can build from the things I have learned in English 103 this semester and continue to grow as a writer and as a person.
Developing theses in papers from the git-go was a challenge for me. Often what happens is I develop a number of different ideas for one paper topic and am unsure of how to shrink that into one, cohesive paper argument. I lose sight of my argument when writing the rest of the paper, and forget to always draw my focus back to the thesis.
This weakens my thesis, and makes my argument or point of the paper less convincing and clear. I had the toughest time with this on the second paper we wrote, the critique paper. This paper was written about appropriation, based off of a movie I was assigned to watch. It was difficult to come up with a sophisticated thesis that was not just “My Name is Khan properly uses appropriation.” Instead, I made my thesis “The movie tackles these uncomfortable subjects bravely and preaches cultural understanding; and while these topics certainly prevail in everyday U.S. society, the film’s overt expression of them and extreme cultural stereotypes shown make for a fascinating yet slightly over-the-top film” (“Khan” 1). I think I had a good idea for the thesis, but because I could only watch the movie once, I had a very hard time organizing my thoughts on the movie in order to support my thesis and make it stronger. My brain was just...
As Miss Bone pointed out, “Without that strong thesis, the evidence and structure felt unfocused” (Bone “Khan” 1). Not being able to develop strong theses and support them properly has to be one of the most frustrating things when writing a paper. It makes you second guess everything you write after the thesis, and if your thesis ends up not being well written, then the rest of your paper is basically garbage as well.
I struggled with how to improve on this, until I reached the research paper. In this paper, it was much easier to develop a thesis and support it because we had to do everything on our own. We basically had the opportunity to write about what we wanted to write about, and research our own evidence to support our thesis. I found this much easier and more interesting to successfully complete. I got to choose a topic I liked, and make an argument that I genuinely believed in. My thesis development improved, and I wrote “Through examining both the structure and history behind Asian school systems and comparing them to the already flawed system in the U.S., clear differences surface,” and I concluded that “this will prove why imitating countries like China and Singapore is not the optimal solution for American educational improvement” (“Reform” 1). This essay was much easier to support, and on one peer review I received the comment “Honestly all of your evidence was relevant and strong relating back to your thesis. Everything supported your position and I don't think you can improve it other than by creating more evidence” (Newhall “Reform” 1).
While my thesis in the research paper was definitely stronger, I had a lot of issues in dealing with the organization. There was so much information on education reform in the United States and the education system in Asian countries. This lead me back to the problem with having too many ideas on one subject and having a hard time narrowing it down to directly relate to my thesis. I was able to pick just a few points that I thought had the most effect in adding credibility to my argument, but putting them in an order that was logical and added strength to my thesis most effectively was a really hard task to accomplish. In my first final draft of the research essay, my organization was lacking and it took away from the believability of my argument. I knew when I turned it in that it was not the best it could be, which was extremely frustrating. I needed major help in fixing it though. When I met with Miss Bone for my paper conference, she confirmed a lot of the issues that I felt that I had with my paper. She simply told me that “[my] organization could use some refinement” (Bone “Reform”). I knew this, but I had to figure out how to rearrange my points so that there would be a build to my strongest arguments and my paper did not die down at the end.
To fix this problem, I basically cut all my paragraphs apart, and kept rearranging them until the order flowed most logically and supported my argument most cohesively. It took a lot of time and effort to do this, and there were many times where I just wanted to give up and leave the paper the way I had it. But I was very determined to receive a better grade through my revision, and so I kept at it until I felt like it made the most sense (which ended up being literally five minutes before the turn in deadline). I hope that my organization in this essay was improved, because it took me days to put it in an order that I felt was most effective. Organization is difficult for me because I write essays generally the way I think, and in the order in which ideas come to me. This order is often extremely sporadic, because I tend to be pretty frazzled when writing essays. My brain would be the one on the right:
This is something that I think has improved a lot in this class simply with practice in writing. Knowing that I will spend many many more years writing papers, I took advantage of this class as my opportunity to improve that about myself. What I enjoyed improving most in this class was my general knowledge base about Asian culture. I come from a fairly diverse area, and had childhood friends who were Japanese and Vietnamese, however, I had never thought about how much I really did not know about Asian culture and traditions. I think that through our conversations, movie watching, YouTube video watching, and tumblr research in class, my awareness of both appropriation and Asian culture has grown. This can be seen through my tumblr posts pretty clearly. In the beginning of my tumblr blog, most of my posts are fairly superficial, surrounding the topics of food, or clothing. As we talked more about Asian countries, artists, culture, and issues in class, I got more interested and started researching a little bit more prior to making my blog posts. My favorite posts included the post I did on Lee Michele, who “[struggled] as a little girl growing up as a race that is not accepted or appreciated in Korea” (“Lee Michele” n.p.). It was so fascinating to learn about another person’s racial oppression that was very parallel to what is experienced in the United States.
Watching shows like Running Man and writing about them was also exciting. The show “takes on an over-exuberant less serious competition style like that of Big Brother or MTV’s the Challenge, without having the reality piece of the group living in one house together” (“Running Man” n.p.). I thought it was cool that the show was very similar to other competition shows here in America. But it was so different that, if you are not used to the style of it, you may have found it a little cheesy and silly, like I did. Overall, I appreciated the experience of learning about the vast and various cultures of different Asian countries; it made this class very exciting and more engaging than simply writing essays about any topic. While I did improve slightly on things like thesis development and organization, and am a much more culturally aware person due to this class, something I still struggle with and probably always will is the use of voice in my papers. Coming from a very strict AP English class last year, it was almost reflex for me to write in a very mechanical, clinical matter. That is what became comfortable for me, and what became easy to do. After doing that for so long, it is so incredibly hard for me to add my own voice and personality into my papers. I hate that. No one enjoys reading a paper, no matter how factual or credible, when there is no personality to it. My papers often sound like they came from a machine, and I am having a very difficult tim fixing that. I do not know how to make my essays more conversational and less stiff. Especially essays that include loads of factual evidence.
On my summary essay in the very beginning of the year, Miss Bone commented that she wished “[my] voice had been more present; [the paper] felt a bit mechanical” (Bone “Peyton Knop”). Even more so, in my eight page research paper, my voice was nearly non-existent. Especially since we had just done a voice exercise in class, it should have been much easier for me to lessen up on the rigid voice I normally use in my papers. But it was not. Miss Bone’s comments on that paper included things like “this piece still read as being a bit mechanical,” and “there is nothing wrong with the writing, per say, but I would like to see you try to add more personality - more ‘you’ - to this paper” (Bone “Reform”).
This was still hard for me to fix because I am more comfortable not putting my personality in papers. It is hard to change a habit like that that you have practiced for so long, but it is something that I know I absolutely need to work on. I think doing more casual papers like this one, will surely help with that. This class has been a majorly beneficial one, for more reasons than just having to do with writing.
I know I still have a lot of growing to do as a writer, but this class made me very aware of the issues I have within my writing, and hopefully I can work on finding ways to fix this. As I continue to take literature and writing classes (not too thrilled about that) I want to definitely continue to develop improved skills in thesis development, organization, and use of voice. English 103 this semester without a doubt put me on the right track to do so. Thanks Miss Bone!
