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Silva1

Christian Silva
Kimberly Lewis
Eng 114A
12 December, 2014
Reflection of The Past
Going into college, I did not know what to expect, especially with writing essays and
papers. I was only given information from my teachers from high school which just seemed to
terrify me. They kept telling me about how if I typed something down wrong or mess up my
citations were wrong then I will be accused of plagiarism and will be immediately expelled.
They also made it seem that college would not try to help me improve my writing. They led me
to believe that how I write at the end of high school would be how I write for the rest of my life.
When I was asked to write my first essay it was completely different from what I had
experienced. The professor asked us to write a narrative that was at least three to four pages long.
In high school, my teacher would tell us to write a paper that had to have a specified number of
paragraphs. They did not care about the length of the paper, they only cared that we were able to
write an essay that had five paragraphs. Since that was the only kind of paper that I knew how to
write, I wrote the essay like that. I started thinking what I would write about and how I was
going to make that into a thesis statement. After that typing the essay was simple. Although
typing an essay like that was what I was comfortable with, I knew that I had to change the way I
write.

Silva2
It became more apparent that I have to change the way I write when I had to write my
second essay for my English class. We were asked to observe an area and then write an
ethnography about it. When we were told what an ethnography was I knew that the way I write
would not be the right way to write the essay. After getting all the necessary information that I
would need for the ethnography, I needed to find a way to start it. The essay was very hard to
start because I did not know how to write my first paragraph, but after a long time and coming up
with nothing I just started typing the other paragraphs thinking that something would spark while
I was writing the rest of the paper and would lead to my introduction. Although it was not the
best system of writing, but it got the job done.
During the semester there were also many assignments, aside from the essays, that helped
me improve as a writer and a reader. One such assignment was the first assignment that I did in
my college English class, Who Would You like to be? The assignment was to write a couple
paragraphs about if you could be any character in any book that you read and live his or her life
in the book who would it be and why. It made me think about who each character was as a
person and why someone would either prefer or despise a certain character.
Although I do not think that my writing as a whole has not changed much, I do believe
that I have improved my writing process. When I was writing my second essay I noticed that I
was able to write a paper that was longer than two page much easier, but it seems that I still have
to work on my editing. From listening to my fellow peers I have learned that I should use a
broader vocabulary when writing my papers because I tend to repeat myself, and that I should
also not add words that are not needed. Although I have improved some there is still much I have
to work on .

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