Reflective Letter Draft !.

If I were still in high school and was asked to put a portfolio together with two of my best works, I am sure that I would hurridly search through my essays and chose the two with the highest grades on them. Then bam, I'd be done. I am also sure that I would never have even had second thoughts about whether or not they were actually my best works. I know that the two works that I chose, they were not the ones that have the two highest grades marked in the upper right corner. This class has taught me better, the content of the writing itself is much more important than the grade. Also, chosing two of the highest grades would leave no room to show my improvement throughout this course.

The first piece of work that I have chosen was my Bacon's Rebellion essay, as it was the starting point to this course. It was the first actual essay that we were asked to turn in in this course. I thought the best way to receive a high grade on the paper was to jam in as much information as I could into this paper. Boy was I wrong, now I know better. My Bacon's Rebellion essay was not a complete disaster though, I did use the templates of the "They Say/I Say" book. This helped me structure my ideas and explain them with effiency as well. My transitions were completely vomituous, and I belive my essay was overly weak. I still received an average grade on this essay, but to me the grade didn't really matter. I wanted to know how to improve my writing, how to make it better for the reader to read. This class taught me how to do that. My second peice of work is proof to that.

The second piece of work that I chose was my writing mid-term, it asked me to read a quote about learning the lessons of history, and then write about it while relating it to some even or parts of my life. I was really excited at this prompt, I knew exactly what I wanted to write about. I used some of the templates in the "They Say/I Say" book that we were given to read. These templates made my story flow so much better, and overall it made the structure of my essay much stronger. My thesis was strong and I had a great hook in the beginning. I was proud that I had greatly improved on my transitions compared to those, or lack thereof, in the Bacon's Rebellion essay. I am sure that if I were to have been assigned this prompt at the beginning of the quarter, I would have approached this essay in a totally different light. It would have been another repeat of Bacon's Rebellion. Most of my strengths are shown in the mid-term. As the quarter continued after the mid-term paper, I continued to work on my weaknesses shown in the Bacon's Rebellion paper as well as improving my strengths.

Before arriving to Puget Sound Early College, I thought that this writing course would be a regular boring writing class where students only wrote for the purpose of stating information and that was as in depth that the essays went. That was how I wrote my essays up until I began doing work in Craig's Writing 101 class. Now that I have taken this course, I have realized that writing is so much more to that. After taking the Writing 101 course I have learned that writing isn't about how well I can or cannot simply state dates or random facts into an essay. Writing in in a conversation is much more effective than writing a typical, five paragraph Jane Schaffer essay style that most students are taught in high school. This course has definately molded me into a better writer by teaching me more effective and practical methods of writing. It not only transformed my writing, it also transformed how I approached writing.