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Alexandra Hunt
Sherman
English
12/09/16

Reflection
This semester I have learned so much about my writing. My nonsense speech-to-text has
been formatted and molded into what seems to be the shape of societal reading. Although behind
the all the grammar laws and proper American spellings, I still made sure to get my point of view
across to my avid audience. Never before have rules stopped me from expressing my opinions
and here where I am critiqued on what I say and how I wrote it; I refuse to let that change.
Luckily for me it seems not to matter really what your opinion is here so long as you can back it
up using text evidence. Reading my writings now they almost seem like someone took my
crazed, spaztastic thoughts and elegantly put them into form on a page; I can hardly believe I
wrote them.
I think the first thing I learned in this class was that writing a story and telling a story are
two completely different things and personally writing takes much more work. Writing a paper
the exact way I would say it out loud just would not work here. For one, grammar and spelling
are much harder to hide when someone is reading the words rather than hearing them. Secondly,
my everyday slang does not bother me, but to someone reading a formal essay it is essentially
unacceptable. These were the first and easiest mistakes to fix. In fact, those were the things that I
expected to be a problem.
What I enjoyed about the class was the mistakes I learned to look for. For example, the
sentence beginnings; I never thought about the repetition before. As well as the length of my

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sentences. I was drilled hard for sentence length in my Review of Unfortunate Events essay.
Sentences like The Series of Unfortunate Events is not about Snicket though, he only narrates
this sad tale as he's goes through investigating the Baudelaire children's misguided and
unpleasant adventure, was far too long and surrounded by other sentences the same length. It
bores the reader. I have also become acquainted with the idea of proof reading. Throughout all
my essays i found a common theme I had in my mistakes were misspellings and not capitalizing
where it was needed. That is kindergarten stuff, I realized this was because I was always rushing.
All I had to do was slow down, proofread, and adjust my paper. It seems kind of silly now that I
was not doing it before.
Overall I found that taking my time and having a friend edit me is the best way to go
about a project. Especially when that project is a tedious writing assignment. The smallest details
in a paper make the biggest difference. Every little comma and quotation can change what it is
you, or someone else, might be trying to say. I think my skill as a young writer has been
increased exponentially by this class and through these lessons.