Rough Draft - Reflective Letter

Les Brown quoted, "Shoot for the moon--even if you miss, you'll land amongst the stars". I can relate to his quote with my progression as a writer. At the start of my first essay, it was difficult for me to transition from high school to college writing. I thought did well in writing essays in high school, but I ended up having trouble writing with the standards of college. The more I learned of my weaknesses, I was able to improve and modify my writing. From my first essay to the last, changing my writing philosopy and my writing process have shown that I improved greatly.

My writing philosophy then was that I follow templates. The templates I learned was for the thesis. For example, a statement and reasons why. Also, I learned how to organize information into an outline provided. My writing process involved using outlines. Sometimes I go with the flow and "throw up" jumbled facts. Writing then was a complete mess.

In collaboration of Writing 101 and History 121, the first essay I wrote was about Bacon’s Rebellion.The shift from high school to college awfully affected this essay that it was easy to identify what weaknesses I need to work on. The essay didn't represent as the "argumentative essay." The thesis was vague and it wasn't arguable. I did well in structuring main points of the argument, but the transition in between the paragraphs were confusing. I did present supporting evidence, but I wrote too much of it that it becomes informational. The excessive information didn't focus on much of the arguments. Also, the lack of opposing arguments should have been incorporated into the essay. I made strong relations, but the word choice throws off the whole connection that it made no sense. Learning from these weaknesses, I made critical improvements into the following academic papers.

One of the following academic papers presenting in the portfolio is "Rhode Island's Debate Over Ratification of the Constitution." The advantage of writing this paper was that it was with a group. We were able to review each other's parts and made some points on what we can further improve on. We presented major points of the argument, being as the anti-federalists, and included relevant supporting evidence, but then again the organization was confusing because the transition were jumpy. Though the strengths of this essay was that the thesis was complex and arguable. It gave a sense what the structure would be like (though it did not in the end). Not only the essay explained the arguments, it pinpoints the antagonistic side. From the most weaknesses to the most strengths, I am able to determine that I had improved significantly in to writing effective essays.

Entering into a college setting of writing, I knew that being dependent on templates limited my creativity. Though I know that when I get used to the templates, I can be able to support topics while using the structure. My writing process now didn't really change much. Though one of the important element of the process I had left out from writing the essay was revision. Knowing my weaknesses from, I spent more time to go back and revise than before.