I learned from both assignments that were easier for me, as well as ones that challenged me. The easiest assignment for me was the ad essay, which is because I am a visual person, and can easily relate to the topic. Although it was the easiest, it was far from easy, and it was a learning experience. The more challenging essay was the rhetorical analysis essay. I have always had trouble with reading comprehension, and this essay was about evaluating a reading, so it was difficult. I overcame this challenge by working hard and taking my professors lessons and applying them to my essays. Although we have been talking about topic and ending sentences all year, it never really clicked in my head that they serve different purposes, and they do more than just summarize the paragraph. At first I knew my ending and topic sentences were not strong, but I did not fully know why. This is only one way that I overcame challenges, and improved my writing.

There were many activities and lessons that helped me throughout these essays. One was the In Class Writing where we would write out our strengths and weaknesses. If you write out a weakness, and analyze and think about it, why wouldn’t you go back and try to improve on them. If we did not write out that reflection, I wouldn’t have even thought about it, and my writing would suffer. An activity that I did not like was the ending reflection where we had to write what we thought we could fix once the essay was done. This was hard for me because if there is anything I think needed fixing, I already fixed it before I handed it in. There were also small In Class Writings about how we wanted to improve from the second essay. This motivated me to actually fix those things, because it would be embarrassing if I said I wanted to work on that and then did not.

Throughout my essays, the lessons in class, and applying skills, I truly think I have improved as a writer and a reader, and that is only a few of the aspects of the class.