Will Payne

Madeline Kinkel

English 101-011

12/2/19

Throughout the first semester of my freshman college experience, I’ve written a couple

papers that have had an affect on my writing style. I also designed a website to showcase my

work. The purpose of this final essay will be to take my readers through a journey of how each

essay was formed from start to finish. Finally, I will discuss how much my writing style has

changed from high school to now and possibly how some of my writing habits and prep work

have changed as well through my time in English 101.

I might as well start on the first essay, the introduction letter. This one was pretty much

just created on the fly, hitting the prompts and giving Ms. Kinkel, my teacher some important

information about me. The thought process was pretty basic and didn’t require a lot of thinking

because most of the topics that were covered in the letter were just things that I either think about

or do almost every day of the week. The editing is a different story. Normally, I just type the

essay, skim and submit. This time, I had a classmate read the essay and then made the

improvements they had suggested and then submitted the paper. Reading it again I realize that

was a bit of a mistake. There were a number of punctuation and grammatical issue that could

have easily been caught by a quick editing run on my part. This was however the only paper that

my editing was really sub par.

The second paper was the memoir. This one proved to be a little more difficult than the

previous paper. Finding a suitable topic, that more people than just me would find interesting

was slowly developing into a challenge. I did however mention that I really liked fishing in my
intro letter, and I figured that most people like Florida if they have been or that they think they

would like to go. So, I thought “Why not put the two together, that oughta make it interesting”.

So I decided to write about my shark fishing extravaganza with my buddies on the island of

Captiva in early April, 2019. Once I settled on this topic, the essay came together very well.

However, my writing style does not make for a very touchy feely reading experience. Being that

is how my personality is, adding that into an essay did actually require revising and editing.

With the help and suggestions of teachers and classmates there was finally some emotion in the

essay. The big thing for me was “show not tell” as my teacher said. As I said the lack of

emotion in my writing makes it difficult for me to do this. But with the editing process I was

able to make it happen.

The third and final major essay, was the profile. This one was also a pretty natural pick.

I decided to write it about the ROTC program and the effect that it has on students and how their

lives differ from the standard college student. This however proved to be a we bit over

ambitious, also considering I wanted to interview 4 people. After trying to start writing the essay

I realized I would need to cut down the scope a good amount. So I wrote a little bit about the

programs history and what effect it has had on me. I also interviewed another freshman, who

was on the Ranger Challenge team that I explained in the profile and he shed a slightly different

light on the program. The variance of opinions was good to show multiple points of view on the

same topic. Even with this essay, I was still struggling with telling people about the program not

showing or painting the picture if you will. Again, the editing process proved very important for

this essay, as did a meeting with the teacher were she gave me some suggestions to really make

the paper come together, and become what you are able to read on my website.
 The two minor essays were the reflections. I decided to lump these together in this essay

because they were both very, very similar in nature. Similar to the reflection that is being read

now, the prompt was, discuss the process, why did you choose your topic, and what do you want

to improve upon. These are very straight forward, short 3-5 paragraph essays that just follow the

prompt and answer the question. The process for that would be make sure the questions were

answered, the word limit was reached, and check for grammar and punctuation issues. Pretty

Simple.

Up to this point I have mentioned a website a number of times. This website, I made was

published by Weebly. I designed it to coincide with my writing style simple and to the point.

The pictures are linked to the essays. I chose the pictures based off of what I thought was a

theme or major point in each essay. THe pages are labeled and the work can be seen underneath

that for the guests viewing pleasure. There’s no frills on this website, it is just my work and

some pictures.

Last discussion point, how much has my style changed in terms of writing and its

process. The short answer would be not as much as I might have hoped. That could be because

of the essays that had to be written or just the way my style had been in high school was already

at the college level. My prep work is normally just enough to have an outline and then I run with

it. With the exception of a few high school research papers that was how I did then too. My

editing has actually gotten better, I do read the essay now before submitting it, not so much last

year. So, the technical quality of my writing has improved but the style and tone of the writing is

still very straight forward, simple and to the point. This style has caused problems for me in the

past. Mainly, my IB history teacher believed that I would not expand enough to fully cover a

topic because there just weren’t enough words. Though some of my previous teachers have
thought this was laziness, that is just the way my writing comes to fruition. My writing has

improved but it is still my style. For future writings that I plan to complete, I will keep my same

straight forward style, but also keep using the more developed editing practices that I have now.

These two coupled together can only make my writing better. These are the effects that English

101 had on my style and writing ability.