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Cruz Sanchez
Professor Bevill
ENGL. 1301-8
Dec. 10, 2014
A Learning Experience

This semester in my English class I have learned many things about how to write
effectively. Whenever, I wrote essays in the past for high school classes, I was never organized
with the paragraphs or with presenting effective supporting details for my topic sentences. My
previous essays consisted of just plain writing with unorganized thoughts and very few
supporting details. This class has taught me how to write effectively, by writing formally,
examining deeply the message I want to present to the audience and organizing my writing.
The first major essay in the class was a Report/Profile assignment. When I first picked
my topic I believed that it was going to be an easy grade because there was so much to write
about the topic I had chosen. Once, I received the first grade mark I saw all the mistakes I had
made. The major issue was the MLA format, the indention was off and I had many grammatical
errors. I did not expect that many errors on my format since that should have been the easiest
part of the assignment. The second peer review of the report helped me more than I expected
because the peer reviewer helped me fix mistakes I had missed; they also suggested which areas
in my paragraphs were effective or missing something.
The Review was the second major assignment of the class and it turned out to be the one
I enjoyed the most writing about. It might have been due to the fact that it consisted on basing
my opinion about the movie I was reviewing. While, writing it I also improved the way I was

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presenting my writing to the audience. Unlike the Report/ Profile which was full of
grammatical mistakes and I was not aware of the audience needs and expectations. There
were a couple of degrading labels I had used in my report when speaking of immigrants
such as, undocumented. On the Review assignment I was more aware on how to be
unbiased and I was more aware of my audience.
There is so much I have learned these couple months about how to write properly.
I learned how to write a rhetorical analysis and how to research which I know will help
me in the future. But I am still not at that point where I feel comfortable writing about
any subject. Mostly because before I took this class, I wrote in one specific tone, which I
thought was my individual tone and would apply to all writings; this class however,
proved me wrong. Now I know how to write without putting my individual tone but just
keeping the writing neutral. I have grown as a writer but still need to keep working on my
skills.