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Gabryelle McDaniel

Dr. Cuddy

ENG 101

December 3, 2019

Narrative essay

I have never been big on writing. Every year in high school, I was placed in advanced

English classes. I never knew why I was always recommended for honors and AP English

classes, but I took the classes due to the fact that I could earn college credits. Before beginning

my freshman year at Hampton University, I thought English classes in college would be

extremely difficult and hard.

Beginning college, I believed my writing skills were average. There were people in my class

whose major required them to be excellent writers. My first assignment for Written

Communication1 was choosing a word from the Oxford English Dictionary and writing about

the origin, definition, and its connection to me. I decided to use the word love. I enjoyed that

essay the most due to the fact that we were allowed to look up a word that related to us or what

we were interested in. I was surprised when I received my essay back with an A as a grade. I

was not able to focus on writing a good essay due to my science and engineering classes with the

countless projects, homework assignments, tests, and quizzes every week. Even though I did not

spend a lot of time on my first essay of my college career, I was proud of the grade I earned.

Shortly after turning in Project 1, our teacher told us about project 2. I did not understand the

prompt of the project fully. When asking around, a lot of my classmates were also confused, but

we came to the conclusion of writing about how the author of a documentary of our choosing

used rhetorical appeal in the film. The original film I was going to choose, my R.A. told me
about. It was going to be about a doctor performing abortions on women who were 8 months

pregnant, but the weekend before the rough draft was due, I had to choose a different film. I

thought the film I choose was going to be about human trafficking, but to my surprise it was

about the amateur porn industry. Out of all the essays, that essay took the longest. For this essay,

my teacher wanted us to write a more detailed thesis statement. The only thesis statements I

knew how to write were the ones everyone knows when you state the main idea of each body

paragraph. Also, I watched the video twice; once for knowing the film and second for getting

quotes. Since it took a lot of time to gather information for this essay, I didn’t spend a lot of time

on writing the essay. Surprising I got an 87.5 on the essay. After the teacher explained how

everyone was confused about the prompt, I felt better about the essay.

Immediately after project 2, we were given project 3. The project had the same prompt as

project 2, but we did it on two pieces of text, one on a scholarly article and the other was another

piece the text of our choosing. Taking a research class in high school with University of

Maryland, Baltimore County, this essay was the easiest. I knew how to research, find scholarly

articles, and compare and contrast scholarly articles from writing a 17-page research paper. The

only thing I struggled with was the rhetorical structure and composing a thesis statement. I

learned about the rhetorical appeals in the past, but I did not truly understand what my teacher

wanted when saying rhetorical structure. After meeting with her about my outline, my teacher

believed I was in the right path for the essay and the prompt, but I did not truly understand what I

was writing about for the essay. I worked more on this essay than the others since it was about

the topic that interested me, Narcos in Mexico. Out of all of my essays, I personally believed my

third essay was my best. I made a very detailed outline that made writing the essay easier.
Overall, I do not believe I changed much as a writer over the course of my first semester of

college. Even though I feel like my writing has not improved, I have learned a lot about writing

from Written Communications 1 with Dr. Cuddy. I learned how to compose a better thesis

statement. Also, I realized making an outline is really beneficial towards making essays faster.

To better my writing skills, I believe I need to practice writing more and also reading well

written pieces of writing to see other writing techniques. For future writing assignments, I’m

going to prepare ahead and make an outline to help assist my writing, while also using what I

learned about making thesis statements in Written Communications 1.

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