Faith Hood

UWRT 1103
Mrs. Rothwell
11 October 2014
Midterm Reflection
Reflection is a process that everyone should do as frequently as possible. This
is because reflecting allows you to look back and see what you have learned from
past experiences, which is a very valuable tool. In University Writing 1103, we have
learned many skills so far. In our multiple works assigned already this semester, the
skills we have learned are evident.
One lesson we have learned in this class is to consider and understand the
audience that you are writing to. When we were told to choose a learning
experience to write in detail about, this became very important. In my opinion, it
was important because when we were told to simply write about multiple
memories, some were more personal than others. There were some memories that I
would not have been comfortable with sharing with the class; therefore I chose not
to write on that specific experience. Instead, I chose to write about my dad teaching
me how to ride a four-wheeler. I got surprisingly personal in this story, for example
I wrote, Life is a beautiful mystery. There are days in our lives when we wake up
thinking we know what will happen that day, and how much that days events will
mean to us in the future. In my experience, we genuinely have no clue. As I was
writing this, I was shocked at how I applied this small learning experience in my life
to something that everyone could relate to. Even though this became more of a

personal experience than I was planning, I was still confident in the amount of
information that I was sharing with my audience.
Another valuable skill that I have learned in the first part of this semester
was how to use specific information to give a dominant impression or opinion. This
skill was very important when choosing what to include in our altered book
projects. We were asked to answer some fairly controversial questions, and it was
up to us, the composers, to answer them according to what impression we wanted
to leave our audience with. This was specifically difficult for me when it came to
religious views, because my personal beliefs have a tendency to become a
controversial topic. I am a Christian, but I make it a point to not shove my beliefs
down other peoples throats. Therefore, I decided to show this through my beliefs
page of my altered book. Instead of putting the traditional church pictures and bible
pictures, I simply wrote the words Jesus and Relationship, because that is truly
what I believe Christianity is about. Based upon the reaction of the class, I
successfully left the impression that I was aiming for.
Finally, this semester has taught me to purposely revise my papers for being
more specific. This was especially useful when writing about learning experiences
because it was supposed to be narrative, and details are key in narratives. On
specific sentence that I changed to be more specific was, I woke up in my brokenin sheets, got dressed in the same way that I always did, but little did I know I was
preparing for a day I would remember forever. Once I decided to add more details,
the sentence transformed into, I woke up in my comfortably broken-in sheets,
got dressed in the same way that I always did: by throwing on the first warm fall

sweater and jeans I laid my eyes on. Personally, I believe this made my narrative
much more interesting and effective. I was very proud of the fact that I had
successfully learned to revise for a specific purpose.
Over the past few weeks, I have also discovered my writing process.
Personally, I like to thoroughly understand what is to be included in the assignment,
and then just begin writing. I like to do this by hand, because it allows me to more
freely express my thoughts. I simply begin doing the assignment, and edit it as I go
along. Once I have covered each required topic, I read back through my writing, and
I edit even more. Sometimes I change sentences or even mark entire ones out. By the
end of this process, my work resembles that of someone who did much more work
than I did. This process works well for me, and I tend to enjoy spilling all of my
words onto a sheet of paper, and then organizing them.
By the end of the semester, I would like to achieve three writing goals. My
first goal is to successfully achieve the show dont tell. This is hard for me because
it gets very difficult to not just come out and say the feeling of the character or
myself. Another goal that I hope to achieve by the end of the semester is to achieve
more flow in my essay. Sometimes it is difficult for me to find a way to make
sentences connect with each other, so I would love to achieve this feat in order to
make my writing better and easier to read. Finally, I would also like to learn how to
do better research when it comes to research papers. I would like to learn this
because research papers are prominent throughout college, and the better I become
at writing them the better my course grades will be.

Addendum:
In this reflection, I believe I assessed the three writing goals very well. I also believe
that based on the way I wrote this reflection, I understand the goals of this course
well, but I do not believe Im as free of a writer as Mrs. Rothwell would like me to be
by the end of this course.