Introduction
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
– Ernest Hemingway
College writing is definitely different from high school writing. For starters, in high school getting an A is equivalent to getting a C in college. College essays are focusing more about how one writes his or her idea in paper, rather than how correctly one answers the topic sentence. Taking classes over the summer in UC Merced has taught me a lot, especially Writing 1. This writing class has taught me the most out of any other writing class I have ever taken. Even though I struggle through it, I give it my all, and take so much from in.
The one thing that I learned through this class was to focus more on how I express my ideas on paper rather than putting all my focus on grammar, yet grammar is still important to know how to use correctly. One thing that I took from this class was that the brain can think of multiple things at once and also thinks faster than when a human writes or talks, therefore the writing process is always more difficult because as a human, one tries to put all these ideas all at once on paper. This helped me understand why it has been so difficult to write everything I think of on paper.
One thing that I also noticed was that, my vocabulary has expanded. Vocabulary has always been one of the main things in writing where I am weak at, and taking this class made me search for a more sophisticated word choice in my essays. Every time a new word that I do not understand the meaning for, I ask anyone for the definition so I am able to use it later in the future.
The process of having to review someone else’s essay and having my own essay reviewed also helped me a lot in two ways. The first is by having someone else read my work, I get different views of how different people react to the way I write. This helps me to change things into something else for it to make more sense to the audience. The second is having the chance to read someone else’s opinion of the same topic. This gives me not only ideas on how to deal with the topic but also different ideas on sentence structure which helps me expand my writing styles.
One of the biggest things we went over and I learned how to do is a thesis statement. Before this, I had never had experience on having to do a thesis statement correctly. Now that I have learned what it is, I am bettering it in every essay I write. Even though it may still need some work, I now know that I can always either go to touring or office hours to help it become stronger. Also I now have some experience with it so I will not have to go into Writing 10 without experience in this topic.
Writing 1 has definitely bettered my writing skills greatly. An example of this is my Weekly Entries, my lowest score was a 6 out of 10 and highest was a 10 out of 10. I feel more confident going into Writing 10 thanks to Writing 1.
Writing 01 