Coming into this class, I had a negative outlook on reading and writing as a whole. While my current outlook has not become entirely positive, I definitely see how it can be enjoyable and I have a better understanding of what the subject is. Along with this new understanding, my writing has changed in a few ways. The most notable among these changes has been my writing quality, meaning that I no longer have grammatical errors or run-on sentences. Other smaller changes include growing my ability to understand/analyze critical sources and being able to more confidently revise the work of others. All of these changes are a reflection of my growth as a writer and my growth as a critical thinker.

The changes in my writing quality mainly come from the constant revision of my own essays and from looking at the writing of others. As I revised my essays and had other people revise them for me, I began to notice trends in the errors people noticed and now I no longer make those errors. You would think I would have corrected these errors already while revising the essays I had written in high school and middle school, but I never DID revise my essays. Hence, why I never was able to fix these recurring mistakes. The higher importance of college courses as well as having engaging topics to write about made me care a lot more about my writing and want to revise it to perfection. Something else that improved my writing was proper planning. This class taught me how to effectively plan out my essays before even starting a draft. This makes the writing/drafting process much simpler and faster and allows me to write more at once which leads to better writing. I also think that my style of writing fits into the topic of writing quality. I wouldn’t say that my main style has changed throughout this semester, as I typically write from a purely scientific viewpoint, but I have definitely explored other styles successfully and have realized that writing can take many different forms such as the op-ed which required a much more opinionated style as compared to the more scientific style I’m used to.

As I mentioned, this class has had a huge emphasis on critical thinking through class discussions, assigned reading, and the topics for our projects. All of these factors have led to me developing more effective critical thinking skills and being able to analyze sources at a higher level. This can be seen mostly in projects 2 and 3, where I had to write on topics of social issues in our society. The issue that I chose to write about for both projects was the presence of racism in media and how it can create bias in a viewer’s mind. The project this was most apparent in was during the literary analysis, where we were asked to analyze a multimodal text. In my opinion, this example clearly shows my ability to analyze sources and understand them well enough to discuss them in my writing.

There is definitely still room for improvement in my writing but my time in First-Year Writing this semester has definitely allowed me to grow as an author and a critical thinker. I hope that my experience this year inspires me to read more and to care more about my writing in the future.