Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

After writing my first college essay in this class, I feel that I have learned a lot about writing and also about myself. When I sat down to write this essay, I was incredibly nervous because the assignment was vague. I wrote about a specific part of my personality that I thought summed up my life as a whole. I was wrong. After getting feedback from students and listening to what I heard in class, I realized that there was so much more to me than one personality trait. Where I had learned to be passionate and determined came from people and things around me. I didn’t realize that there were so many factors in my life that made me who I am. If this were an essay for high school I probably would have left it the way it was and as a result would have never realized everything I learned from this essay. I am very proud of the whole new side of writing that this essay has opened up for me. Even if this essay did not turn out to be amazing, I still personally feel that I have opened up and shared my life with people that I do not know and I am completely okay with it.

Another thing that was new to me was that I have never written so many drafts before. After I rewrote my entire first essay that took me three hours, I figured that the other three hours to get to my second draft would be fine. I, once again, was wrong. I learned that by rewriting my essay multiple times, led me to figure out better ways to prove my argument or identity. Even by switching around three sentences changed one entire paragraph drastically. The time and effort that I put into this essay was extravagant, but to get the amount of information that I wanted to and for others to understand me entirely, I needed to do it.

Also, grammar is a huge issue for me. In high school I never really focused too much on it because my teachers never made such a big deal out of it. After spending one and a half hours in English 112, I learned more than I did in my enitre senior year of high school. It clearly wasn’t my strong point which is common of many freshmen in college, so I wasn’t too worried. By reading through the Penguin Handbook and the comments on my essay, I was able to fix most of these errors, although I may have still missed some. Either way I still learned new rules and plan to use them in my next essay.

One more thing that I learned from writing this essay was organization. My first draft was all over the place. I would say statements in one paragraph and would not explain them thoroughly for another three paragraphs. I wasn’t very clear in my argument and was confused as to what the difference was between identity and position. After peer reviewing and having my essay corrected, I was able to see what I had done wrong and had two more opportunities to tune it. This allowed me to take the time and go through my mistakes and not only fix them, but understand them as well.

Writing on a college level is a very different experience than that of high school. I have learned to care a lot more about my writing and at them same time enjoy what I am writing. In a sense, this essay helped me to place myself and know what point of my life I am at. I learned that I have grown in some parts but still need work in others. I really enjoyed this experience and can not wait to improve some more. This essay had a positive impact on my ideas, grammar, organization, and writing as a whole.