Kyle 1

Kyle Cordova
Mrs. Litle
Eng 121
21 April 2017
Evolving as a Writer
At the beginning of this class I was a pretty unexperienced writer and my past writing

works were underwhelming to say the least. I was surprised how much the class would challenge

me and help me grow into a better writer. There were things that we went over in high school

that were expanded upon and there were quite a few new things that I learned to help transform

my writing into something I didnt think I was capable of. Not only did I learn about writing but

I learned some other valuable information that can help me in the future. I was able to become a

better writer and transform my writing by the use of revision, selection, and reflection.
One of the first opportunities to learn from my writing for improvement came from the

form of my first paper. Without even getting to the actual body of writing you can see a mistake

I made by titling my paper paper 1. I learned that I need to have an interesting title to draw the

readers attention. A good title could have been The Most Interesting Man In Southern

Colorado. I also used second person pronouns such as you. If I would like to say something

similar I could put a person or an individual. I also had a habit of dispersing random tangents

throughout the paper that did not help me support my thesis.

I wasnt surprised on how much I could improve on because for the longest time writing

was just writing for me. I did it as an assignment and never thought of how deep it could go. I

learned in my second paper that there is a lot more than one would think, that goes into everyday

media. We learned how some advertisements were able to pull some emotions and responses that

the advertising company wanted. Some of these techniques would range from some obvious

things like the main subject and focal point of the advertisement to something not as apparent

such as the color choice. We also learned about ethos, pathos and logos and how we can use them

in our writing to help get our point across. I used some of the skills I learned to identify some of
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the characteristics of a world war 2 propaganda poster. I used some of the feedback off my first

paper and took it into consideration.

My second paper I feel showed the most improvement. I was able to take some of the

feedback and I was able to apply the recommendations such as adding an attention-grabbing title.

However, my second paper was far from perfect and there were many things to learn from. I

learned that I did not explain some things. One of the things I did not explain was what war this

poster was tied to. Sure, later in the paper some of the pieces could be put together and it can be

found that it was world war 2 but I should have stated it in the first paragraph. I also did not

describe the whole poster itself before jumping straight into analyzing the parts of it.
During the semester, we were also tasked with writing journals of differing topics.

Usually they were easy to find what you wanted to write about. My favorite journal was

probably Journal 2. The prompt was basically what object did we fell like represented us. It

stumped me for quite a while. But I finally came up with an object that I feel represented me. I

gave supporting reasons why it did represent me and I feel like that journal helped me with my

writing.
Paper 3 was next in line. At first I was a bit intimidated. I never really read anything

scholarly and it was almost like a foreign language to me. The feelings of intimidation soon

deteriorated as we went over it in class. I liked how the class discussed the meaning of

Bazermans paper and it helped me understand it by the use of real world examples and how it all

is connected. My biggest problem is accurately citing. This has always been one of my biggest

problems with writing. One of the things that was a problem throughout my paper was that I was

citing the paragraph number instead of the page number.

In our final paper, more or less the same problems arose for me. It was an issue with

citing. I forgot the in-text citations completely and this hurt my grade. I should have used the in-

text citations after the statements I had in parenthesis. I also had an issue with my annotated
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bibliography. I did not format it correctly. One of the sources I did not format in MLA because I

did not know how to cite a pdf and I was too crunched for time to attempt to learn from the

Purdue MLA citation resource that was provided. In my head, it was better to paste the link and

give credit than to not cite it and risk plagiarism.

As the semester comes to a close I can look back and see improvement from where I

started. I was lacking many skills in writing that I feel I soon was able to address and work on to

improve my writing. It was not necessarily an easy ride and many mistakes on my end were

made. However, I feel like that more is learned from mistakes than anything else.