Patrick Kelley

Professor Rieman

English 1101X

2/23/10

Mid-Term Reflection

This semester I am enrolled in an English 1101x class. This class can also be labeled as a

writing class. That being said it is apparent that the major point of this class is to improve our

skills in writing. It is very important to be the best writer possible not only for the work place,

but even more so for college itself. At the college level you can find yourself writing papers

even in a math class. This makes it imperative that we as students learn and take in all we can

to better ourselves as writers. The process that has been taken to improve our writing so far

has been reading comprehension, note taking, and peer evaluation on our works.

So far this semester our only major reading was and educational essay on a study taken

in New Jersey. The writer of this essay was Jean Anyon and she wrote about this study to

discuss the effects of social class on a areas school systems and styles of teaching. She brings up

many points and observations showing the different characteristics of each school due to social

class. I found this essay to be rather interesting though I also felt that the study itself was rather

flawed. I felt that the study needed to be more extensive. For example, I believe the two major

aspects the study should have been done is to have done the study in high schools rather than

elementary schools and to discuss the effects of social class on parental guidance, and the
effects of those styles of parental guidance to the corresponding students in that same social

class.

We, the students, went through the process of the class to help improve our writing.

This started with note taking. We first read the essay and took notes that we felt were

important and interesting. This is always the first step in writing, to gain information that we

can discuss and write about. Personally I go though and highlight what I feel is important

information, something I’d like to discuss, or a quote I would like to use. We then took these

points to class where we shared and discussed them so that we could round the edges of the

information we found to be relevant. I personally found this to be very helpful. It not only

allowed us to better understand our own points, but to hear the points of others that maybe

we passed over.

After taking notes and discussing them, our next assignments was to go back and reread

the essay by Anyon. This assignment relates to reading comprehension. At this point I

personally re-read the material and highlight anything that I missed the first time around. I then

take all the highlighted points and organize them as bullets so that I can organize them based

on information, ideas, or opinions. These organized groups of information become my

paragraphs. I believe this assignment was truly the reading comprehension part of the process

to improve our reading rather than reading the essay the first time. I believe this because one is

going to comprehend something much better after discussing the points we recorded, as we did

in class, than from the first reading. I also feel that just simply reading something again can
greatly improve one’s comprehension of the material because they are many things you might

miss or not fully understand.

Once we had re-read the essay we were to write an inquiry on it explaining the essay as

well as our opinions and ideas after analyzing it ourselves. We then brought our papers to class

where we peer work shopped. This is the final step in the process of improving our writing. As I

explained earlier when discussing comparing our notes on the essay, I feel the peer work

shopping is a very helpful thing to do. We get feedback on our paper from several people. Being

that everyone has a different writing style you get to see different ideas that you may have

never thought of to improve your paper.

I feel that this process helps me a lot towards fine tuning a paper. It does this by helping

me see me weaknesses as well as improving my strengths. I feel that I can be rather elaborate

at times, use a decent range of vocabulary, and use quality information. On the other hand I do

have a few weaknesses. I at time over use my ability to elaborate which leads to that feeling of

something just going on an on, whether be a paragraph or just a sentence. A also lose flow

sometimes, I just right off the top of my head and my brain can be rather segmented at times.

Finally I am a horrible speller and if not for spelling check I would be in a world of trouble. Over

all I have enjoyed this class and hope that it will continue to help improve me as a writer.