Dylan Haggart 

Instructor Camilleri 

ENG 160-21 

6 October 2021 

Situation Essay 

Before this course, my initial thoughts on writing were that I completely despised it. It was something I always dreaded throughout my grade school years. It was always my least favorite type of assignment, I preferred actual tests way more. I always struggled writing about certain topics, topics that did not hold much interest to me. We always had to author essays on boring books and poems that we were forced to read in my high school English classes. But after taking Composition 1 my attitude towards writing has changed a good amount. In all our major essays, we had the freedom to write on topics we wanted to write about. In our literacy narrative essay, we were able to write about our literacy, the rhetorical analysis we were able to choose any commercial we wanted to write about and analyze, and our research essay we were able to do research on any topic that held any sort of interest to us. Being able to write about topics I have an interest in makes writing so much easier and less of a chore.  

My process towards writing has also changed dramatically. I used to just go straight into it with no brainstorming at all. Now I try and plan out what I would like to write about and in what order I want to put everything in that would make the most logical sense and be the easiest to understand for the reader. I try and make my writing interesting to everyone even if the topic I am writing about is not particularly interesting to them. Sometimes I do the body paragraphs first before the introduction paragraph because I do not always know exactly what my writing is going to be about or I do not know what the main idea of my essay will be, so I leave the thesis statement as the last step in my essay even though it is in the beginning. My word style has never been the greatest, but it is something I strongly believe I have improved upon since starting this course, and it is still something I am looking to improve upon going forward into writing and rhetoric.  

I feel like my literacy narrative essay was my most successful piece of writing because I wrote about such a huge part of my life using a lot of detail to explain everything about it. I also feel that most people would find it to be my most interesting piece of writing because it is the most unique. It was definitely the most enjoyable paper I have written so far in college across all of my classes not just English. Talking through my entire business and how it got started was very enjoyable as far as writing goes. It allowed me to be super creative and unique with that topic. 

One of my favorite readings from class is the “Shitty First Drafts” article, the premise of this article is that first drafts of essays are never the greatest no matter how good of a writer you are. Starting out and completing a piece of writing is always difficult. The best writers will always feel like they are lacking creativity when writing. In the article they discuss this topic and how writing is not something that comes easy to many people “Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it. Nor do they go about their business feeling dewy and thrilled” (Lamott). This is a very relatable quote because when I write I don’t totally know what I am going to be writing about I usually start writing and figure it out the best I can as I go. I never start with a clear picture of what my essay is going to look like. 

A revision I wish I could make is I wish I were more descriptive in my research essay and explained things in better detail. Looking back at it I was too broad on topics and should have used more sources to add greater value to what I was researching. Journals were extremely helpful throughout the semester because it is important to journal about what is going on in your current life and to get your thoughts out on a piece of paper, it makes me feel much better about myself. The information we learned about plagiarism was also immensely helpful because it helped remind me of a bunch of the rules about plagiarism, so I do not accidentally do it. It is so easy to accidentally plagiarize something accidentally if you paraphrase something from a website and forget to cite it or put quotations in the wrong spot or do not know how to make a proper work cited page in MLA format.  

My assessment of my work in this class semester is that I have improved my writing but still have lots of room to grow and improve. My strengths are my organization, clarity, and conventions. Some of my weaknesses I would say are my development. Sometimes I feel like I do not thoroughly enough explain a certain topic or idea that I am trying to break down to the reader, which can lead to them being confused. Also, I feel like I do not use the best language, meaning that my writing sometimes can be repetitive or does not use the best grammar. 

I am ready to move on to writing and rhetoric because I have drastically improved my writing and going into writing and rhetoric, I will improve my writing even more so. Since a lot of the essays in the class are academic arguments if I am given an argument to defend against that I strongly agree with I feel that I would do a wonderful job doing that. Taking aside any argument is fun to do, especially when you can debate the argument with your classmates because it brings up interesting topics of discussion.  

Works Cited 

Haggart, D. (2021, October 6). Literacy Narrative. Google Docs. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZLuZLmvp2jQ4FmpM-Rx1WaajlQrxQjDssDIaLGCDm_Q/edit.  

Lamott, A. (n.d.). Shitty first drafts – wrd.as.uky.edu. Retrieved December 2, 2021, from https://wrd.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/1-Shitty%20First%20Drafts.pdf?platform=hootsuite.