Post Course Reflection

This course has taught me many vital skills concerned with literature. It has mostly improved my abilities of writing, but has also educated me in the area of reading. It has allowed me to progress into a more driven and efficient writer, while also increasing my abilities as an analyst. I have received from this class much more that what I was expecting. I have obtained abilities far greater and prevalent in the many areas than what I was hoping for.

What I enjoyed the most about this course is that there was a lot of leniency with the topics which to write about. I feel that this played a major role in improving my writing skills because new techniques can be more easily introduced and taught when the students are writing about a topic that reflects their personal interest. It is much harder for a student, well at least for me, to acquire more information about writing while facing an essay that has a more narrow and foreign subject.

For this reason I also believe that the most papers that I have written throughout this semester are of higher quality than those written in my American Literature class during the first semester. I think that the outcome of a paper can severely depend upon how much interest the writer has in the topic of the essay. The success of my outside reading essay for Always Running can be attributed to fact that this course has allowed students to choose and read any biography or memoir that they wanted. I am sure that if it were mandatory that everyone read a given biography for which to write about, the process would be a lot less pleasant, causing the outcome of the papers to be significantly worse. This assignment and similar others have caused me to put forward more interest when writing and reading future compositions, and to not think about them in same unenthusiastic way.

The outside reading assignment was definitely a positive experience. Permitting the rest of the students and me to write a thematic essay about our choice of biography undoubtedly worked in our favor. The most important thing that it taught me is how interesting writing a paper could be as long as the writer is fueled by a topic that fascinates him/her.

The writing skills that I improved throughout the course are included in a wide range of areas. The most important however, revolves around the issue of how to approach the essay. I have now learned that in order to write a successful essay I have to spend enough time to come up with a challenging, but interesting, topic that I can keep my mind on and enjoyably write about. This is probably the most essential element in writing because as long as there is a motive for which to write, the writer feels more comfortable and can gather ideas and can express them more efficiently, while having the ability spend more time working on organization, clarity, etc.

Without a doubt this course has developed my writing skills far much more than I have anticipated. With the help of flexible writing assignments I have gained lots of valuable information on how to write essays. I now feel more confident about writing future papers, college essays especially. Most of all, I feel great about being able to express my thoughts about a topic with accuracy and clarity in a well developed essay.