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Nathan West

Lang-120

Professor Graves

11/12/2017

Where Am I Now? A Final Reflection Narrative on Writing

Writing is difficult. It is difficult to begin, difficult to stop and difficult to plan. However, it is

incredibly satisfying to create something that is entirely your own, made from your mind and a topic. Or

at least this is how I, an eighteen-year-old college student, perceive the act of writing. I dont write all

that much outside of class or for any specific task, but when I do write something, I must force myself to

start but after that its hard to find a good place to stop. The way I write is constantly evolving as I find

new ways to express myself and reading articles helping me develop the best way to write a cohesive

essay. As such, LANG-120 has been a very beneficial class for me to take as it has helped improve my

writing and taught me what I need to look for while reading as to get the best information I need out of

it. Ive learned to look at the texts that I read much more carefully and look for specific questions and

how different groups of people will view them. The class has used a number of useful assignments and

exercises to get these new ideas and viewpoints to stick with me. These numerous ways of practicing

different ways of looking at the problem of writing do not give me a template of what I should use, but

rather gives me the pieces of what good writing looks like and leaves it up to me to assemble them. The

essays I have written throughout the semester provide a good timeline of my growth as a writer in this

class and where I am going to go next in my journey.

As with most things, it is always best to start at the beginning. The first piece of writing I did for

this class was a letter for Professor Graves demonstrating how well I could write coming in to LANG-120.
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The letter, which is also about my writing experiences, was meant form a baseline measurement to look

back on a later date. Upon this later date, as I reread my old work, I can see where I have improved in

some areas, but overall, I have not changed my overall style all that much. It is unpolished, as I did not

revise my writing beyond a cursory spelling and grammar check, and as such, the letter is my unedited

thoughts on the topic. During my time in LANG-120, I learned several effective ways of checking over my

work, finding mistakes not picked up by a quick check, rewriting passages to better fit with the rest of

the text and improving the general flow of the piece. I first started revising my work in earnest after my

meeting with Professor Graves about the first draft of my literacy narrative. He had me read through my

text out loud and mark where I stumbled or changed a word around, and then had me go back and

rework the wording around those points in order to make it flow better. It astounded me how I missed

such an easy tactic in revising my papers and improving them immensely in such a short amount of time.

Coupled with the idea of a shitty first draft, this gives me a basis to work on instead of working from a

blank Word and futilely attempting to prefect it the first time around. This helps immensely with making

introductions, as I can never start any piece of writing off well enough that I dont go back at the end

and write a much better one later. With the compulsion to make everything perfect the first time

around being assuaged, I can skip the intro and go straight into writing out the content and put in an

introduction when it comes naturally. One more part of the revision process that was not so much

taught to me by this class as given to me through meeting several friends who I can get a second opinion

on my text. In high school, most of the people in my class were not enthusiastic writers and most did not

want to be there so it was very hard to get a peer to review my work that actually cared about my

writing beyond what would get me a good grade. College is a great place for this because everybody is

here because they want to, and as such are much more enthusiastic about helping out a colleague

and/or friend.
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Speaking of high school, a disquietingly large part of this course is involved in trying to change

my perception of writing from what has been taught to me in the last few years to something that is

more focused around me rather than a curriculum. Everything in high school is focused around grades

and getting into college, and the strictly controlled categories for everything stifled any enjoyment or

creativity I could have had while writing school essays. However, in college and especially in LANG-120,

there are no hard guidelines beyond that of a topic and a loose wordcount, which is very freeing and

makes the experience of writing a lot more pleasurable. One especially constricting guideline was the

mandatory five paragraph essay structure that neatly laid out what the best essay looks like and what

every single essay will be graded on. Fitting individual thought on the topic into five paragraphs of five

sentences each is not very easy and stifled what I wanted to ask and write about. The freedom of

choosing what structure I want to pursue while still giving myself some form of limitation via the word

count helps me think about what I want to ask and answer without being overwhelmed by everything

on the topic. For example, my literacy narrative, one of the longer essays Ive written in this class, had a

very broad critical question for me to answer, asking me about my personal experiences with writing.

Now, this topic is incredibly broad and could be approached any number of ways ranging from a

timeline of my life in writing or a quick look at a handful of important events and how they affected my

writing throughout my life. These different answers to the question provide very different perspectives

to my life and can sway ones opinion of me as I could only show what I think presents me in a good light

or I could strive to make it as true to me as I can. I attempt to be a neutral as possible, but I am not

always able to suspend my unconscious bias toward myself.

The final, and most important in my eyes, addition to my newfound writing repertoire is the

practice of information literacy. In other terms, reading academic texts and getting the information

pertinent to what I need at that moment. The ability to skim through a particularly tough text and find

the pieces I need is invaluable and saves a lot of time. This was mostly taught through the rhetorical
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summary assignments in which we read an article on a topic pertinent to the class we were having that

day and wrote a summary focusing on several different things. The things were the audience, the author

and the overriding purpose of the narrative, all of which can be found quickly yet still require some

thought on the nature of the text. This makes it so that even though I may not have read the entire text,

I can still get the useful bits of information out of it and get some great context on it as well. I have

found myself looking more closely at other classes texts as well, looking for what audience it is geared

toward and trying to view it through their eyes, as well as checking out the author of the piece and

seeing if they have the qualifications to be an authority on the matter. This idea plays a large part of my

argument that academic blogging is a valid form of writing in academia in my paper Academic Blogging

in the Field of Religious Studies in which I compare Theresa Thonneys idea of six steps in every good

academic paper (Thonney 348) to several examples of academic blogging picked randomly from a

variety of sources. While researching these connections, I used the same motions I used while writing

the rhetorical summaries adapted for looking for these six steps in addition to the other parts. This has

helped me immensely on other projects in other classes as well, making flipping through a book or

article, looking for a part that actually supports my argument much easier as well as capturing the

overall point of the text as well.

In conclusion, LANG-120 has been a very helpful class that has given me a wide assortment of

useful ideas and tricks to get the most from both my writing and my reading. I would recommend taking

this class as some point during everybodys college career if it was not already mandatory for

graduation. My writing has improved over the course of the semester, although there is still a way to go

and I hope I can still improve.

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Works Cited

Thonney, T. (2011). Teaching the Conventions of Academic Discourse. Teaching English in the Two-Year

College, (38).4, 347-62

West, N. (2017). Letter to Professor Graves. LANG-120

West, N. (2017). Looking Back and Moving Forward. LANG-120