Reflective Essay on Writing 101
University of Maryland University College
October 7, 2014
I chose to participate in WRTG 101 not only because it’s a core requirement towards my degree plan, but to enhance my writing skills. Over the past few months, with the help of my Professor and classmates, I’ve honed my writing skills watching them improve from being decent to something better. Overall I expect to learn and refresh writing skills and identity what skills I need to improve by the end of this class.
The first week of class I was thinking would be similar to the end of High School refreshing things we’ve should already know. Reading about reading, writing and library skills I started to remember many tools previously learned and thought I was ahead of the game. A few weeks later we started our first essay, however I wasn’t expecting what was coming. I had to write a comparison-contrast essay something I’ve never done before. I wrote my rough draft thinking that it was made of gold, however when Dr. Kimme sent back my rough draft I was I shocked. Dr. Kimme showed me exactly what I had done wrong and how to correct it. Going through the corrections some were obvious, but others weren’t so apparent. I didn’t use correct APA format, failed to cite the authors correctly and even forgot to create a cover page. I now remembered these rules for the most part and continued on with my studies. So in the first two weeks of class I’ve already learned valuable skills that I will carry with me in further assignments. In my life time whenever I’ve seen sentences broken up with commas I believed they were not being used correctly. The third week of class we discussed different ways commas are used and discovered what I believed was wrong was right. Using the use of commas exercise I learned the correct ways such as providing additional information about an individual which definitely would help me in writing essays. The next assignment was a cause and effect essay, this essay sounded simple; however I still failed to learn from my past and had various grammatical errors. Dr. Kimme noted that some of sentences were awkward and I still failed to cite APA correctly. After making many corrections to my paper I felt very disappointed with myself that I still didn’t correctly perform the basics and provide a quality paper free of grammatical errors. I soon realized that this wasn’t going to happen and the reason I’m here is to learn. What is important is listen to my professor and just improve each time. Moving on to weeks 5 and 6, I learned about how to correctly write a thesis statement. Before I would write an idea, but be very vague with it and not go into detail leaving out supporting ideas for the statement. Another valuable skill that I acquired during this time was clarifying inductive and deductive reasoning. Both of these styles can be used to approach a topic in allowing the writer to cover something specific or in a broader range. The next essay for us to