Davis 1 Tyler Davis Anthony Borrero ENGL 1101-068 December 6, 2012 Final Reflection Mr.

Borreros English 1101 class has been a great experience and also an eye-opener for myself. Coming into this class, I viewed myself as an excellent writer, but boy was I wrong. I had a lot to improve at, as I still do. To improve in these areas, a great deal of work would have to be put forward on my behalf. I have worked towards bettering my skills as a writer over the course of the semester and I have made great progress. While in Mr. Borreros class, I have a lot about literacy. One of the significant things we learned about literacy was during our very first journal entry, where we wrote about what is and is not a text, as well as what it means to be literate and illiterate. I learned that text includes much more than something with letters and numbers on it. Many things can be considered a text, including books, newspapers, tweets, and also abstract mediums like instruments and foods. Basically anything with a particular meaning to a person can be textual. I also learned about different forms genres and their functions during our Journal #5 entry. A genre can be defined as a classification of literature in which the style shares characteristics like content and format. I had no idea that so many things could be considered a genre, even something as small as a Post-It note with a message. This journal entry enlightened me to understand all the different possibilities of different genres. It is what ultimately helped me determine that a yearbook is a genre and that I could use it for my genretized narrative. A yearbook has a function of telling a story of events that happen over time through the use of

Davis 2 images and text. This activity really helped me understand the magnitude of all the different genres. During this course, I learned that my writing process was nowhere near where it should have been. Originally, I was doing very little pre-writing. I would plan a little here and there and expect the rest to come to me later on. I was planning out the main things I wanted to talk about and then start typing away, which made my papers, turn out very choppy and unorganized. They also were not small narrative thanks to my lack of planning ahead. My literacy narrative is an example of that. Now, I have been planning out my paragraphs and even key sentences that need to be discussed in each paragraph. I have improved at sequencing my papers into logical orders that understanding the content much easier for the reader. Had it not been for this course, I probably would not have made this improvement and reading my papers would still be very difficult. Throughout this class, I have discovered a couple of weaknesses that I have as a writer. One of my weaknesses was my habit of reusing words frequently throughout a paper. Doing this makes the paper very boring for the audience to read. It is also a very simple obstacle to overcome, which I have over the semester. I have begun using a thesaurus to help broaden my vocabulary usage in my papers. Another weakness of mine in writing has been the difficulty I have writing conclusion sentences and conclusion paragraphs. This is fairly evident in a lot of my writing from within this course. Writing the conclusion sentences and paragraphs seem to be the most difficult problem for me to solve. I have a very hard time wrapping up everything that I previously state, and instead of attempting to write a conclusion, I just ignore it and give up. That was a very bad habit to get into and I have recently put in effort to improve my skill in writing conclusions.

Davis 3 Actually practicing writing conclusions will be the only way that I will progress in that area of writing. I am very glad that I have chosen to take this course and that I had Mr. Borrero as my teacher. I feel that I would not have been pushed and encouraged to improve as much as I have been had I had a different instructor. I have made many strives in order to become a better writer and it is all thanks to Mr. Borrero. He was able to explain exactly where my writing had flaws and gave great suggestions as to how to fix my writing. I hope to further improve as a writer afer this semester is over.