Assignment 26- Bhoomi Shah

      Geez, where to start. This year has definitely been an adventure in and of itself. It was a struggle for the majority of the ride; however, having competent and experienced teachers really made the year easier in so many ways. It's hard to learn subject matter by yourself so when I walked into to Lang I thought that's what I would have to do because how can you really teach writing?  Oh was I wrong. After the first writing prompt we had, I felt lost because I thought my writing was terrible and never going to improve. From there I decided I was going to get a 2 on the test. What can you do to make writing better? I never was in a situation where I had to write a well-developed paper in a short period of time (on-demands aside). It honestly scared me. However, by doing multiple papers and by having the opportunity, in the beginning, to improve them as we typed I felt like I was slowly developing my style. Soon by the second semester, I had a clear idea of how I wanted to write the only challenge now was figuring out how to organize given information into my writing. All in all, the copious amounts of writing we did really did make me feel prepared for the exam and I did see improvement throughout the year which I thought in August I would never see. I also was a huge fan of peer reviewing our classmate's writing, especially when we did it in groups. The whole experience matured my public-speaking abilities and also let me think critically over different writing techniques. I felt like at the end of the year it was much easier for me to tell a bad paper from a good one with just a quick skim as I now understood what to look for.
     Though I did love the majority of our classes, I do have some criticism. Reading from the Writing America book those couple of days in class did not really help me. For the most part, I thought of it as busy work if anything else. I liked the writing with style book, but for me, the Writing America book seemed too confusing to understand the grasp of in one reading and most of the techniques it taught were not really helpful when you only have an hour to write the paper. Instead, if you took the time instead to teach maybe the different argument styles to the class through powerpoint it might be easier to understand and digest.
   Overall thank you for your continued passion for writing and interesting thought provoking conversations we had throughout the year through socratic seminar or just plain discussion of the news. The class itself was fun and a nice way to start my day!