Daniel Whitmire

UWRT 1101
Professor Arnold
4 November 2014
Midterm Reflection
Writing and understanding English in a holistic perspective has never been one of
my strong points in school. I often have a great deal of difficulty getting my thoughts and
ideas on to the paper and turning it into a successful writing assignment. My writings
often lack coherence and sometimes assignment requirements because of it. Thus far, I
do not believe that I progressed in a way that I should have. Through my high school
years and the first half of my first semester in college, my writing has been stagnant.
Considering the level of education that I am at, I believe that my writings should be much
better than they are and could use a lot of improvement. To make my writings better, I
believe I would need to improve in vocabulary, organization, and content.
My first writing assignment this semester was the Literacy Narrative; where I
focused my paper on becoming literate in firefighting. I had to conduct an online review
with one of my peers in the class and have them record and give me feedback on what
needed work. I found this to be helpful because they seemed to be more inclined as to say
what was actually wrong, whereas other teachers that Ive had in the past just say to go
back and revise a certain part with little other detail about it. I believe this was one of the
easier assignments that I have completed because of the fact that it was completely
organic in the sense that I could choose what to write about and how to organize it. My
final draft of this assignment was a bit more put together, but could still use improvement

on word usage and more straying away from the thesis being all in one sentence. I
understand how its okay to use the same word multiple times in an essay, but after
producing a restaurant review for an assignment, I became obsessed with the poet like
choices of words in my writings and found that having a long thesis crowded into one
sentence, truly slows down the reading of the work.
My second writing assignment for the semester was a restaurant review of a
uptown, Italian venue named, Vapiano. The restaurant review was to be done as a genre
analysis. I didnt have any problems with finding a writer that I could study, or a
documents of their work; I had a problem with getting the assignment started. I
understood the assignment perfectly and knew exactly what needed to be done, but when
it came to doing the introductory paragraph I got stuck. I believe this would be another
example of not being able to fully put all my thoughts together in a way that they could
be written down for the assignment. I had enough knowledge on the topic to do so, but
again, I lacked the vocabulary and fluency of a completely organic writer because much
of English in high school was preparing us for the AP test at the end of the year, and
focusing on the types of essays that we would have to write then.
Concluding, I do not consider myself as meeting my educational writing
expectations. I know that I am capable of doing much better than I have been. With
completing this self-assessment, I now am aware of what needs to be changed for be to
become the great writer that I strive to be. Improvement of my organization, content, and
the use of more advanced college level vocabulary, I believe that I will be able to meet
the goals that I have aimed for in my college courses. I think that by acknowledging the

issues that I have with composing great writing assignments, I have already begun to
make progress.