Dear Reader,

Before this course I felt more prepared than I did for English 160. English160 made me prepared for this course and a lot less nervous about my writing. After ENG160 I was still not completely confident in my writing and struggled with syntax in papers. I was excited to take Professor Gaudiana’s course again because last semester he completely changed the way I felt about English, and I was thrilled to be able to continue improving my writing and reading skills. I feel a lot more confident in my writing, analyzing, and syntax after taking this course. In the beginning of the spring 2022 semester when I completed my first draft of my research paper Professor Gaudiana stated that I needed to work on syntax. The way I improved syntax in my writings for the rest of the semester is I would read my papers out loud and look for sentences that sounded cluttered or noticed that I repeated a word too often in the paper.

In English 170 we were taught many skills and a skill that I learned I now utilize in my other classes is annotating texts. In this course we were frequently assigned articles that we had to analyze to prepare for a discussion about our analysis of the article. This has helped me in my history course to analyze long articles and my Spanish course to help me better understand it in English. Analyzing articles throughout the semester has helped me feel more comfortable with understanding long articles and picking out the pieces that are important. This will help me in my future studies and my career when I am analyzing articles that I have to write a paper on and will also help me when I am a teacher when I have to analyze student’s assignments. With everything I have learned throughout English 170 I have learned that before writing a paper it is a good idea to outline your ideas for the writing assignment and what sources you will be using. For example, for my research paper I first outlined how I was going to structure the paper, what details I wanted to include, and which resources I was going to cite. I also learned that it is extremely important to have a classmate peer review my papers because it then gives me new ideas, and ways to improve my paper. For example, I had a classmate peer review my visual analysis and they helped me think about different ways I could analyze details in the painting.

I used to be terrified to take an English course in college because in high school I struggled with grammar, analyzing, syntax, revising and more. I came into college thinking that my English skills would never be able to improve, and I would continue to struggle. After a year of taking English courses in college I feel prepared to continue taking higher level English courses and I am positive that I am a much better reader and writer then I was in High School. After this course I feel that my writing skills have improved immensely, and I believe that I do an expectational job at creating a focused and debatable thesis and incorporating MLA format in all of my papers. I do believe that I need to continue working on language use, and the research process. I am thankful for the way these past two English courses have changed my perspective on English and my confidence.

Sincerely,

Destiny Keshner