Reflective Essay: It's finally over!!!

I will not lie and say that I have always enjoyed writing, or that I even claim to enjoy doing it now. Whenever a paper has been assigned to me, I cannot for the life of me remember a time when I was excited to do it. I do, however, love writing for myself, such as in a journal, or on topics I care about, without a length requirement. Because of this lack of excitement for writing, I have always felt that my writing was mediocre and could have been better. I have always ended up rushing through papers, and leaving out details, which my AP English teacher always got on my ass about because in that class, details in our essays were what got us the scores we needed to get college credit for the class. She told me I had good ideas, I just needed more details to support those ideas. Well I honestly don’t feel as if I have gotten any better at utilizing details to support my ideas, with the exception of my post about MySpace, in which I felt I relayed details pretty well, as you can see here: “MySpace uses simple language, big, bright, bold links to useful operations such as music and videos, and there are usually directions telling you how to use these tools…MySpace really speaks out to younger kids also because of its focal point, to connect with other people and show off your own style. With so many options for your page, such as music, backgrounds, pictures, graphics and text, you can really express who you are on this site. You need to recognize a need to be different and expressive to really use MySpace to your advantage.” When it comes to topics such as this, a website that can be easily analyzed, I have gotten better at writing more descriptive details. I still feel I need to take more time to develop these details to support my ideas and thesis, but I have come further along in that I can at least recognize that lack of supporting details is one of my weaknesses in writing.
A strength I know I have always had in my writing is my voice. I find it very easy to put my own character and personality into my writing to make sure that reader’s can identify my point of view and hopefully understand where I am coming from. When we had the free write assignment in May, I chose to write about my relationships with boys as strictly friends, and I felt my voice came out in that post the easiest, as seen in this passage: “Well for one, my boyfriend had a bitch fit about it, even after I explained I have known Bryce longer than I have know him, and that it would be safer as well. He compared it to him living with some girl he has known for about two years, and I became so irritated, I hung up on him.” Anyone who knows me just a tiny bit can see me actually hanging up on my boyfriend, and I feel like I wrote that story as if I were telling it to a friend the next day.
An attribute I feel I have taken from this class is the ability to write for certain audiences. Honestly, before this class, I never really considered who I was writing a piece for, I always just wrote for my teacher to read. The format of this class as a blog has really opened my eyes to considering who is actually reading your work, and I think I have come to be a better writer in that aspect. My first post about MySpace, as you can see above, was very formal and followed what the teacher wanted to a letter almost, but near the end of the class I found I could add more humor and stray from the path of the assignment just a bit because of the college audience I was writing for. I found I could be more honest in what I really thought, as when we started the unit on Rhetorical analysis, and we had to choose a photograph to write on as an observation, then a reflection and then an argument. I was not ashamed to say the picture I chose reminded me of the kid’s movie Cars, “The first reflection I had about this photo came to me the first time I saw it, and that thought was about “tractor tipping” from the Disney movie Cars. It made me laugh because I could see the scene from the movie where Mater and Lightening (two characters from the movie, for those of you who haven’t seen it) go out into a field in the middle of the night, where the tractors are all sleeping, and then they proceed to honk in front of the tractors to startle them awake…”.
Overall, I am very happy with what this class has done to my writing skills. I feel I am more prepared for future college writing experiences, I just need a little more work. But you can’t fix everything at once, now can you?