In this final assessment of my English class I’ve decided to discuss the goals that I have achieved in this course and even the ones that I haven’t. This course in itself has been a very different and difficult one at that because I’ve never taken an online course before. Although the course seemed complicated, overbearing and too complex to understand, I fought through it and prevailed to the end. My professor was a great addition to the class because she knew exactly what she was discussing and talking about at every class meeting. Without her guidance I don’t think my writing itself would have ever improved or progressively gotten better this year.
One of the goals I’ve learned and then improved on throughout this course would be how to brainstorm and map ideas in my writing. At the beginning of the semester I would never brainstorm ideas or map them out on a piece of paper to help me better my essays. I understand now that if you want your papers/essays to be the best they can then you should brainstorm indefinitely. A piece of mine that represents me brainstorming before I wrote it would be http://godhigh.blogspot.com/2012/03/sports-related-to-my-writing-life.htmlmainly cause I put a lot of thought and work into this blog post. First I wrote the blog post out on a piece of paper, revised it and then finalized it on the computer with little to no errors.
Another goal I’ve greatly progressed in from the beginning of the year to now would be effectively revising my writing, which I now know enhances your paper fully. The last time I revised my writing was probably in high school, because they forced us to, but now that I’m in college I willingly do it to help better my writings. My professor mentioned that workshops for revising/editing your paper are held in the Ace Building, I then immediately signed up for all the help I could get because I knew I needed it. When I was preparing to type another blog post of mine which was http://godhigh.blogspot.com/2012/03/living-in-your-relatives-shadow.htmlI decided to write it all down first and take it to Ace to be revised. Looking back on that certain blog post now I’m glad I got it revised because there were a lot of mistakes in it.
The third goal of mine that has improved a lot over this spring year is effectively editing and proofreading my writing before submitting it. Back in my first semester of my previous English 101 class I would never proofread my writing because I thought it was a waste of time, but then I NC’ed the class. However, in the following semester I knew I would have to edit everything and proofread everything in my new English class so that I could get a well-deserved grade. In this piece http://godhigh.blogspot.com/2012/03/ds-106-visual-assignment.htmlI actually went back to my blog post and edited it and read it over about four or five times to get the mistakes out. I’m glad I learned and nearly perfected this goal because it’s truly improved my writing skills.
In English you need to always know how to develop a thesis and how to support it as well. Those were two of my goals that I reached and attained in this year’s semester. At the beginning of the year I thought because it’s an online course I wouldn’t need to use a thesis that much, but then I found out we had to submit blog posts as essays online basically. However, in these two blog posts http://godhigh.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-my-grandmother-taught-me-how-to.html& http://godhigh.blogspot.com/2012/02/effects-of-music-on-my-writing.htmlI wrote a great thesis and supported it very well with the information I wrote following it. Most of my papers in the past years of my education rarely had thesis statements, which I thought was ok, but then I realized that if I included a thesis statement and supported it then it will be a better paper. I’m glad that Mrs. Sasser taught her class the way she did because it forced me to start all of my papers with a thesis and then support it.
The goals that I’ve yet to achieve aren’t difficult ones but they always seem to pose a problem in all of my writings in my education. One of them is: effective consideration of writing purpose which I didn’t really understand in class until now and I plan on considering every purpose in my writing pieces in my following years of school to better them. Another goal I didn’t achieve fully would be: how to document others’ ideas in my writing mainly because I never really knew how to, but over the summer I’m going to attend workshops to improve in that area. How to integrate others into my writing was never really taught to me in my previous English class so coming into this year I didn’t know how to do it, until I talked to my sister a couple of days ago, I now know how to incorporate peers in my writing for the future. I’ve never actually considered my role as a writer because I would just write to write and to get it over with, but now I know that if I know my role as a writer it’ll benefit me and my papers. In high school my teachers would always tell me to write for my audience and to keep them interested, on the other hand I never got that concept, but now that I’m done with this English course I can say that Mrs. Sasser helped me understand how to write for the audience and I’ll continue to better myself in that field.
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