December 11, 2000
English 22

English has always been my favorite class in school. Even when I was in the first grade, I was behind the entire class having just moved from California, where the school curriculum was far behind compared to that of Hawaii, reading time was my favorite part of school. Now, in college, English 22 was the first English class I've taken since graduating high school. Teachers have always told me my writing is exceptionally good for my age, however, I never took it to heart, since may of the things I write tend to be written during one shot writing sessions, then never edited or looked at again. Procrastinating till the night before a paper is due, then typing something out in ten minutes was the way I completed nearly all of my papers in high school. English 22 has helped me to learn how to revise my work and catch my mistakes, and to revise my own work, instead of relying on someone else to do it for me.

Writing Paper 1, Sharing Memories, began as a very simple task. Since the assignment was to write about something I knew, it required no research, and the only requirements were to sit and type. Once finished, the draft, which was handed in as an exploratory writing, was more a rough draft. I believe it was here I learned I cannot write abstractly, jotting down idea's as they come to me, then reworking the mumble jumble into an actual draft. When I had to take the exploratory writing and change it into a draft, I found that going through my work once over dramatically improved the overall quality of the paper.

During the second and third paper, I still turned in rough drafts as exploratory writings, but I increasingly revised before turning them in. Revising mechanical problems as well as the flow of sentences into each other helped turn these two papers into better works.

The in class papers I found hard to complete. The first paper was a little easier, perhaps because the topic interested me, but the second paper was extremely difficult and I struggled greatly with it. The ease of being able to go back through a paper and edit and change things on a computer has spoiled me, and I find it hard spit out a paper in 50 minutes of writing. Even when I do a one shot deal with a paper on a computer, I can still go back and edit as needed, where with pencil and paper; it's almost impossible to change lengthy areas of the paper.

The final research paper was perhaps the most challenging. Since my paper was extremely long, I needed to be exceptionally organized in not only with sources and where I retained the information from, but also with the actual composition of the paper and organization of information within the body of the paper. Literally cutting my paper apart and pasting it together on a poster board helped me organized the jumble of information I had typed out all at once. From there I was able to go back and edit mechanical errors and reorganized the information in chronological and rational order. Paper 7 was a challenge of love, since the topic was the most interesting thing I could have picked. Had I chosen a paper on anything else, I would have written a standard four-page paper meeting the requirements, but would be the bare minimum of what I could do.

English 22 has taught me many things, but most importantly, I now know the importance of procedure regarding writing a paper and revision. Editing mechanical and technical errors and well and the flow of the paper are extremely important and cannot be preformed in a simple ten minute typing session. Even if only once, revising a paper is key to projecting the point of the paper.