Reflection #1

            Growing up, writing has always been something that I had immense pleasure in doing because it comes more naturally to me than most other things. This does not make me an expert at writing by any standard, but I do believe that it did help me in regard to enhancing and expanding my horizons as I grew as a writer. Despite my passion for reading and writing, I definitely have run into several issues when it comes to being an active reader. An active reader is someone who is able to evaluate and determine important key concepts or ideas in a passage. A goal that I set for myself at the beginning of the semester to become a better active reader was that I hope to improve my annotating and comprehension skills. I think that when it comes to annotating, visually it looks correct, but I am not truly picking out the most important information in the text. I think a major aspect of annotation that I need to work on is being able to describe the whole text after I have completed my annotations to see if I completely understood what I just read.

            So far, I have worked on improving these goals by annotating my own work after I have written it, not only for this class but for other assignments as well. For instance, when I revise a paper for my friend I work on weeding out information that is or is not necessary for the paper and I think that the critical thinking involved in this process is aiding my attempts at improving my active reading skills. However, I think that I am still able to work towards my goal in other ways that I will try to do in the future. This includes annotating my readings for classes such as history and communications because I typically have a lot to read for these two classes.

            Up to this point in the semester, I can already see an improvement in my writing ability. I think that as I do more and more assignments, I am slowly starting to connect the active reading concepts I was taught in class with my own work. An example through my own work is the difference between my first and forth journal entries. In the first, I had all of the concepts needed for the topic; however, I don’t think that it was my best work. In my forth entry, I had much clearer ideas that flowed together in a stronger way. This may have been from the setup of the two different assignments, but I can see in my own writing that I improved my writing skills from the first to forth. I think that I definitely have room to improve on my responsibility in this course by working harder to keep track of the assignments posted on the blog page. But despite this, I think that every single entry I make is to the absolute best of my ability and I am proud of my improvements thus far.

            A major takeaway of my development so far is that I have learned to analyze my own work more thoroughly and efficiently. I used to be a writer that would skim through my own work when I am finished and not clearly peruse through what I wrote to look for simple errors that can easily be fixed. Overall, I think I have become a “less lazy” writer in a sense. Despite these accomplishments, this does not mean that I am only getting better. I think that one thing I need to improve on majorly is my responsibility and participation in class. I do contribute to class discussions when I have an idea that I think is sufficient enough to share with the class, but I do think that I can definitely offer more of my personal insight during our class discussions. For the syllabus, a “B” student is described as a person who “arrives on time, attends class regularly, and is focused on the matters at hand.” I believe that I am best described as this student because I always come on time and am attentive to the topics being discussed. I think I am not an "A" student yet, because I am still working on my speaking skills and I need to improve on the participation aspect of the grading scale. I am not the best public speaker, so that has always been something that has held me back, but I know that I am able to do anything I set my mind to, so I think one takeaway I have from this assignment is that I need to work on improving in that aspect specifically and I will keep this in mind for the remainder of the semester in this course.