Matthew Enriquez

Professor Brittany B Vicars                                                                             

English Composition 101

December 11, 2022

How has my writing improved throughout my first freshman year? Before college, my writing was always rough at best. I never really focused on grammar or making it thoughtful, but after seeing everyone in class be so passionate about their writing without fearing other people’s thoughts, I had to rethink my work. I’ve been putting my whole thoughts into my writing and taking all the criticism that comes with it. I wish to constantly improve. My writing has its own type of linguistic style in which I write simple sentences that are easily readable but have great depth with the use of simple, not overwhelming, complex upper-class words. I became more empowered to write like this when we read the short essay from Amy Tang, which talked about how her writing was meant to even be understood by her immigrant mother. Sometimes my writing style does make it hard for me to allow the readers to understand deeper meaning, so I have to spend more time on that. My favorite genres for expressing myself are social science, self-help stories, and nonfiction pieces about my problems. Those genres allow me to tell the reader and myself how my life is going and how I should improve it, but also how I’m destroying that so-called progress that I so much want. It enables me to go through my work several times to hopefully address my problems. I even established a writing approach to help me mainstream my thoughts into paper to make it simpler to express myself. This effort consists of me thinking about the issue for 30 minutes while making myself sad to generate more relevant points. Those meaningful points give me staging grounds to branch off ideas for a long essay. In addition, I use the same strategy when conducting my editing after peer review or my teacher reviewing my work. Talking about my emotions in writing has been important to me this semester since it has not only helped me learn to articulate myself more effectively, but it has also helped me extend my understanding of literature. This semester also taught me that if I put in the time and effort, I can produce a good, meaningful article. I am not generally the type of person who pours her heart and feelings onto paper, so knowing that I had the confidence and capacity to do so surprised me. I won’t lie, English has never been one of my strongest subjects; I’m more indifferent… I feel one of the reasons English isn’t one of my strongest subjects is that I sometimes don’t know where to begin a piece of writing, even if I know the topic. I just seem to blank out. These past couple months have made me realize college English classes are completely different from high school English classes. Not only because they are college level, but also because aside from reading a wide selection of writing pieces and analyzing them, we dive deeper into the history and meaning of literature. Compared to high school,  we just read a novel and at the end we would write an essay regarding something like theme, compare and contrast, impact, etc. Also, my classmates are a joy to be around in class; they seem passionate and knowledgeable about what they say, and they also speak very effectively when they deliver their short writing piece. When I see my classmates speak, it gives me confidence to be more outgoing because they seem very professional, structured, and clear, which is what I want to sound like when I present. Professor Vicars has also given me her feedback, which has been invaluable in allowing me to develop my work even more.  She stated that my work has improved since the first assignment I submitted. Some of my future writing goals for myself include becoming more elaborate with my writing so that it doesn’t sound so basic and boring, becoming more creative with my writing, expanding my vocabulary a bit more, becoming better at organizing my writing, acquiring the ability to write longer, and, most importantly, learning how to begin and end a writing piece because I feel like that is the most difficult in my work. All of these changes will not only help me become a better writer but will also allow me to produce more detailed and professional work. In the future, I would like to write historical fiction since I have always been captivated with that genre of writing and have been reading historical fiction since I was a child, and I would like to follow that ambition as a result. I hope that my latter work demonstrates that I’ve improved and that it meets my expectations and ambitions.