Writing Wrap up

Writing Wrap Up

            Over the course of the year my knowledge in writing has increased thanks to my classmates and Dr. D. In each writing assignment my classmates helped revise my papers and gave me suggestions that eventually helped raise my grades. Dr. D has helped me to appreciate writing a lot more and she showed me how to use different techniques in multiple writing styles.

In all my writing pieces I have found some errors that occur in many of my papers: missing commas, comma splices, and spelling errors. However, I do show lots of good characteristics in my papers: great titles, good organization, and ideas. The most challenging paper to me this year was writing the global issues research paper. Although researching material for that paper was easy; I discovered that I wasn’t very good at merging that material into the final product---this actually happened in all my papers that required in text citations. In the research paper I found that about 70 percent of the comments were on quote integration, comma splices, and the “spider man” flaw---the quotes jump around not making much sense. These simple mistakes ultimately led to my grades reflecting my mistakes.

This year my classmates have done a great job in peer editing during our editing  groups; when I take advantage of their feedback it dramatically changes my resulting grade. Although my scores have gone down since the beginning of the year, I feel like my writing has ascended over the course of the year especially in grammar. It took an abundance of point deductions at first to get me to stop using comma splices but now I feel like I’m a professional. My knowledge using feedback on subject verb agreement is still cloudy, and I still do not have a clear sense of what mistakes I have made in my writing. Although, some feedback has saved me from disaster, almost all of my quotes were done incorrectly.

            This year in English has been interesting and with every new prompt comes challenges. Even though I have been improving over the year in my writing I feel like I could have done much better. Also on my Wrap Test I did not do as well as I had hoped, in fact, I did worst than last year getting all 4’s except two 3.5’s. Compared to eighth grade, the grades dropped .5 and 1 in all categories, although it is above average I did not achieve my goal.  In spite of all the difficulties, I still have stayed consistent for the most part especially in organization and ideas. Even though they went down overall I have improved my writing this year in many ways.