Writers Reflection 

Hello, my name is Nathaly Olivares. My past experiences with writing classes weren’t necessarily the best but neither were they the worst. Writing to me has always been something I was good at more so when I was reading more often. However, a book isn’t something I’ve picked up for a while. My writing during this semester definitely showed that. I definitely did struggle to write this semester as life caught me by surprise. It was a hard semester emotionally to say the least but I’m proud enough to have met the deadline for each one, not including the deadline for the first drafts. When I write, I need a quiet place. Sometimes, I’ll listen to instrumental melodic music, gentle ones that can ease my mind. Sometimes, that’s too loud for my thoughts to flow. Either way, I need to write in my own space and usually, that’s at home or even alone at the library. When I write, I write without any structure. I let my thoughts flow to then organize them at a later date. If not this, I’ll try to formulate an outline, so that everything doesn’t seem so scattered. Either way, I need to write something, anything. It feels good to know that I at least have something written down and my paper isn’t left blank and empty. 

`From the course objectives, One way in which I’ve cooperated with my peers in order to improve and develop my writing skills was through peer review. We would find a peer and evaluate their writing as they did with ours. This way, we were able to gain a different perspective on how to go about writing. This was really refreshing as we can get so caught up on how we do things that we may forget to explore different means of writing. Though we all have our own unique writing styles it’s important to get feedback from the external world in order to make sure our writing is palatable to our reader. I think my approach for reading, drafting, revising and self-reflection was quite stagnant. There wasn’t much improvement as I didn’t dedicate enough of my time to this class because I was going through a lot emotionally. I did have an understanding of my audience though, and I do believe that after my field study, I did improve on writing specifically for my audience. For my field study, though it was meant for children, the lack of description said otherwise. But from there, I was able to understand my audience and write accordingly. We collaborated with our peers in many ways. We collaborated through peer reviews, in-class discussions, panel discussions as well as during our last project. Our last project was based on collaboration. We were separated into groups, design, editing, and content. Even whilst having our in-group responsibilities, we also paired up with one of our classmates to complete an assignment of our choice. The project was a pamphlet in which consisted of all that we’ve done in class beyond the syllabus. My classmate, Jenniffer and I, wrote about the panel discussion. We had a limited amount of sentences that we can write so it was challenging condensing all of the information together but we got it done. After that, some of my peers and I from the design group stayed after school to finish formatting and designing the pamphlet. Once everyone was done with their assignments, it was sent to us and we were meant to designate how it’ll look to our audience. The ways in which our professor Jane wanted us to explore different modes of expression were through pictures. She encouraged us to show visuals in order to give our audience even more of an understanding. This gave them an image to go with what we wrote. For our scientific rhetorical Analysis as well as our scientific controversial paper, we had to use the Ccnys library resources such as their databases that included peer-reviewed work. We also used articles from the New York Times and other reliable news sources to back up our writing and to also learn from.

This English class has taught me many things through my errors. Though my learning process isn’t seen much through the progression of my writing, I definitely learned. I learned about myself and the things I need to prioritize. I learned about the value of time and the value of planning. I also understand that I could’ve gained more from this class if I was more engaging with my professor, Jane. I was out of the loop this semester but writing teaches you to be present.