ENGL102 – WEEK 6 Reflection

·         Discuss your experience writing your assignment, reviewing your instructor’s initial feedback, and revising your response.

·         Explain some of your writing process and what you thought worked well.

·         Also, detail some of what in your process you will look to improve for next time. 

Week 6 Reflection

My writing and I have been in a love/hate kind I struggled to choose one of the three prompts offered use for my essay. When I figured out what I could write about, I wasted no time brainstorming the subjects to include in my writing. I am not creative enough in this way and find it much easier to write a workplace memo or email where I can easily form a basis of subjects to discuss. My outline was simple, it started with the Introduction paragraph to introduce my topic, which was about creating content for a website that would be beneficial to my employer’s practice. The first body paragraph was to describe my boss’s generic website. Body paragraph number two was to describe my research and writing process putting the content together for the website. Body paragraph number three was to describe the reveal of the website that I had created for my boss. And the conclusion was to include answers to the questions the assignment directions had prompted.

 Once I started writing, the information flowed smoothly, and I had plenty of content. But I got stuck and couldn’t get started on the process of narrowing the information down to meet proper word count minimums. I turned in my finished version to be graded by the instructor, which was a bad decision on my part. It was not ready, but I was stuck, and I don’t know if it was because I knew the teacher would be helping with revisions as to why I left it in that state to be turned in. Usually I will check the rubric, which was available for this assignment, where I would have firstly, worked on the word count as my instructor noted was two hundred words over count. Secondly, my instructor noted that I did not include a thesis statement in my writing, which was an essential part of the assignment. For this assignment, not checking with the rubric was very costly on my grade.

After I received the instructors’ grade and feedback, it was amazingly easy to start the revision process from there. However, I feel that this process should have been done before I turned it in to be graded initially. I understand much better now that it is okay to put my writing assignment away and come back to it later to start the revision process. I also feel like I over dramatize this kind of writing assignment and I don’t need to think about them in this way in the future. In editing my second version to be turned in, first, I focused on cutting the paper down and removing information that was not needed. Then I focused on a three-step process to include step one:  global revisions or looking at the big picture, step two: paragraph structure and step three: sentence structure. I was able to make some changes that included switching some sentences around and changing words used which I feel were very helpful to my work. In the future, I will work to improve my pre-writing skills as I better understand that it is just as important as is the actual writing process. Also, I will refer with the rubric as I usually do, after this assignment, I don’t think I will miss this part as a last step in the future.