Blog Post #7

By the time I graduated high school, I was pretty confident in my writing abilities. While I knew that I had much more to learn in college, I was unaware of the extent to which this class would change my opinion on my own writing. After taking LHSP 125, I have realized that one of my biggest struggles in the writing process of any English assignment is developing a strong, organized essay around a central thesis — which I learned very early on in my education, but never discussed further in the context of college-level writing. Also, in LHSP 125, I was first introduced to the idea of a complex thesis when we were working on Essay Assignment #4 which further complicated how I worked with a thesis. Overall, this class challenged how I organized, structure, draft, and develop a thesis while writing an essay, and has left me less confident than at the start of this semester. However, I think this is a good thing because it means that I have risen my standards for my writing and motivates me to continue to grow as a writing because I am now aware of where my weaknesses lie. 

In this English course, I have had to write longer papers that count towards more of my cumulative grade in shorter amounts of time. As a result, I’ve developed new methods and processes of writing essays in general. Specifically, rather starting by brainstorming or outlining, I now immediately start writing paragraphs of ideas as they pop into my head because I’ve learned that getting all my initial ideas down as fast as I can ultimately leave me with less work to do later in the drafting process. This saves an immense amount of my time and makes my work longer with less overall effort.

A final thing I learned from this course is descriptive writing. In high school English, I never got the opportunity to neither write descriptive pieces nor creative/personal narratives like I did in this class. I’m glad that I got the chance to write in this way because I think it was valuable to my overall writing abilities by letting me explore a writing perspectives and voices I have not been able to before.