English 21007 has been a very adventures class. First day finding this class was one of the biggest adventures. I am a sophomore in college but a newbie at City College of New York. I had to use the map from the CCNY website and I was so confused. My battery was dying because my two hour commute had drained my battery life. These last few minutes were critical because who wants to be late to their first class of the semester at a new school. I went into the classroom, took in the faces of my new classmates and thought to myself “this is going to be horrible”. I missed the familiar setting on my Staten Island campus, the feeling of anxiety settling in my stomach as I stared into the face of a new semester. Aside from the journey to the class English 21007 had its ups and downs like every other class, but English has never been a friend to me so more downs than ups. Even though I do not like writing at all, I had fun writing the Proposal piece, it was my favorite out of all the assignments given. This paper gave me a chance to work with a group of intelligent kids and putting our heads together we came up with this innovated device that can actually become real one day and I was very happy with our work. On the other hand the introduction letter was my least favorite, I don’t like talking about my self, so to sit down and write a page about my life, my goals, and my dreams wasn’t the most pleasant thing for me to do. I have never been a good writer to begin with and for me to write a decent paper I have to want to do it. If I force myself to writer it, it will be me putting some garbage together and handing it in. I’ve always been somewhat a novice at writing and when I write papers, the language I use is how I would speak. The way we are supposed to write is more suffocated or professional and I am not great at doing that. Although I do work for an engineering company as an engineer and when I write to clients or agencies like the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) I have to write professional letters, forms or emails, so I have picked up somethings from work. This is another reason the Proposal paper was my favorite is because of my work. I have been asked to read over proposals before they are sent to clients so I can get a feel for what they look like and how to write them, but I have never written one. This class gave me the opportunity to do so and I got to put my knowledge to use and this paper will help me with my job too. It’s one of the first times I can take something I learned from school and apply it to my life. Even after all this, I still need to work on my writing, grammar and just my overall language, but I have some methods to resolve this and make me a better writer. I always read over my paper, but the trick is to do it in a few hours or a day later because If I am to read over it right after I write it I have some tunnel vision and can’t catch my mistakes. Another way I try to get around this is asking a friend, peer, or even family member to read over it. I know that no one wants to review and entire paper, so I will take a section of the paper that I am questionable about or a section I think needs work done, but I do not know how to fix it and ask them to read it and add comments for me to work on. Things like this is what got me through this course. Even though I am not strong in writing I do work hard for my classes. I may have not spent as much time as required for me to get an A in this course as I should have, but no matter how much I like or hate a class I always try to the best of my ability and try to be the best one in the class. Even for the collaborative projects, when my classmates slacked off I didn’t complain, I did their work for them. If you want something done right do it yourself right? There’s no point in bugging someone to do something so they can put in fifty percent effort and end up getting me a bad grade or going to the professor so I can bother her with a problem that’s not going to be fixed, so I go out of my way to make sure I get the grade I deserve. I am not saying they did not do work, but where they slacked off I picked up. Also a big part of why I didn’t need my classmates is because the drafts we got to send in and received feed back on. This was one of the best things about this class, this is a prime example of how I said I usually have someone like a peer, friend, or family member review my paper, the professor created a system where she does that for us and there’s no better feed back then from the person who is going to be grading your paper. This helped a lot with my writing process and was the reason I received some of the good grades I received. If this was not part of the course I probably would have went to the writing center or something for extra help, but I never been there. Another reason I have never been there is because I am new to this school and I have no idea where it is.

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