Mandy Tran

Maya Silver

Writing 2010

April 20th, 2017

Looking Back at a Younger Writer

Attaining another push towards better writing. With each writing class, I have gained an

eye for what is demanded of my writing. As I reflect on my experience in this course, I have seen

myself grow. I have grown not only pertaining to better writing but to understanding my writing.

Reading over each of my previous essays and revisions, I have seen a shift in cohesion of topics,

sentence structure, and conclusions. Developing in these concepts helps my papers become

easier to read and understand.

Writing my first paper, the biggest struggle was my cohesion of topics. Once we had our

peer review in class, I remember one of my peers said my paper was chunky. Realizing the

fact of needing to work on transitioning from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph,

will help me create better papers. For example these two sentences does not flow together within

the paragraph, This is a problem because we are not trained to detect disinformation, allowing

ourselves to be fooled by the articles and news broadcasts to deceive us. Fake news is all around

us and has been around since Plato. Through introduction new topics will create a better

transition and flow to a new argument. For instance, the following sentences from my synthesis

two revision shows the development, Race is more socially constructed than biologically

constructed because scientist has not found a race gene (Andersen & Collins, 57). A race

gene is a theory where each race has a specific gene found in individuals of a certain race. In
Race is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue, Gannon quotes there is no single variant

where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans have another (1). How I have created

more cohesion among sentences is through introduction of the topics.

Creating more cohesion with sentences, there is a need to create good sentence structure.

The structure of my sentences placed the why before the what. This was seen in the sentence,

Deciding what will be used to talk about the key issues and proposal claims for fake news, was

a start to creating my map. Knowing this I have fixed the problem in my contribution paper

with the following sentence, A race gene is a theory where each race has a specific gene

found in individuals of a certain race. Race is more socially constructed than biologically

constructed because scientist has not found a race gene. What I did was rearranging the

sentence to state what the sentence was about before why was it important. Doing so will help

the reader understand my thought process.

With each paper there needs to be a conclusion. Conclusions consists of the so what

factor, review of the main arguments, and solutions. How my writing has improved with my

conclusions are through recapping what the main argument being said in the paragraph and

overall section or paper. Comparing my last few paragraphs of my synthesis one and my

contribution paper, I have seen a difference in emphasizing the argument. Before, I focused on

solutions but now I have more of what a conclusion needs.

Learning from my past mistakes of transitioning from sentences or paragraphs, sentence

structure, and concluding my arguments, helped me create a better paper. I have learn to use

more transition words and introduce new topics to better help my readers understand. Another

way to help my readers understand my topic is through the placement of my sentences. How I
have done this is stating the what before the why. As transitions and sentences develops to create

a better flow, a conclusion is needed to emphasize my argument. For readers to focus on the

main topics, I have included all aspects of a conclusion. Developing new skills of writing and

continuing to use them in my future writing, will help me become a better writer for my readers.

These skills will also help me to emphasize my argument to become more convincing. As I am

practicing the skills that I have developed, I hope to attain new skills such as paper organizations.