Reflective Essay

In this class, I am exposed to a learning style that helped me improve on both structured academic assignments and creative writing assignments. This year's English class is very different from the one I am used to last year. The main difference is the writing style. Last year, writing was based on incorporating ideas to be able to write formally. Although it was one of hardest challenges, I am happy that I have learned and improved. Switching to care free style with my own voice as a writer was definitely a huge surprise. It was not hard to adjust to, but I had a feeling that I was stepping back from all the hard trained work of last year. But in fact, I was wrong. There are many aspects of this writing that helped me. On blogs, I have been practicing with my own voice on variety of subjects. Even though this is supposed to come natural, it has suddenly become foreign to me. Lately, I realized the similarities in these two distinct types of writing.

Writing blogs every week have definitely made me become more aware of my sentence structures in writing. As I have not noticed before, formal writing has a bit of a similar sentence structures to that of free writing. To me, it serves as the basis for any type of writing. For example, it became easier for me to structure my sentences to flow in Mrs. Corbally's essay on Learning Styles. Improving in this area allows me to do better in the harder levels of formal writing.

However, there are important differences between the both. The voice is one important key point. I began to acknowledge that every blog had a personality behind it, and I have never incorporated this factor into any of my formal essays. Perhaps it is because free writing sounds more like talking. (Response to Aimee's speech ) In blogs, I am able to use an everyday voice with different vocabularies. For example, I would use words like “really”, “like”, “just”, “that”, slurs, and plenty of repetition; because that is the imperfect way that I talk. When I am speaking, I sometimes encounter chunkiness in my speech. The technique of cutting back redundancy also helped me make my words flow. From repetitive (Response to Amber G.), to less repetitive (The Two Faces of Religion). I believe the increase of incorporating my own voice in writing would further allow me to speak more fluently as well as help my fluency in formal papers. I also enjoyed reading my peers’ writing, especially when it is something greatly written. In conclusion, personality adds an interesting twist of connection towards the writer’s view.

I am breaking out of writing informative and more to writing personally, which I had hated before. I disliked writing things about my life because I feel like nobody would care anyways. In this blog, it shows how I always write very informative.

“The most common lucid dreaming activity is flying. You can actually feel the activities you are doing in lucid dreams. That is why it is most important to train your brain to recall with your senses. When you first lucid dream it might be a bit creepy. When I tried lucid dreaming, I was in a dream where I was talking with two people and then suddenly the people morphed into each other and then kept morphing into different things. Turns out, this is one of the first stages of sleeping. Also, keep in mind that what you do in your dream is all in your mind. It is similar to imagination. Have fun with this and try to lucid dream! Also, find other techniques if these don't work for you.” (Lucid Dreaming)

Having an interesting topic allow me to write more. Later on, I began to write more in relation to myself.

“Because of the existence of horrible events, people question whether there is a God. Even though these things have happened, I still believe there is a god, but we just cannot understand the way he/she works or how he/she determines our destiny. I think everything that happened have a reason. Maybe god is not conducting everything. Perhaps he allows humans to lead their own road, so that's why we make mistakes, and then he justify us on what we have done in our lives, the choices we have made, and then gives us feedback like karma or happiness or whatever there is. There are so many people in this world; can he possibly control every one of our lives? Are allowing people to die a sacrifice so that humans can grasp the meaning behind it? Logic does not help in this case, but it's worth a try.” (Religion is Complicated)

My writing has not improved in much ways. Most of its progress is the reduction of redundancy. Instead, my writing have transformed from the informative voice to my own voice.

I still have not tried many varieties of writing. I hope this semester I would be able to write something different from the usual. Moreover, I want to improve on concise, clear, and descriptive vocabularies. One of the hardest choices is picking the right vocabulary choice that pinpoints exactly what I’m trying to say. Furthermore, I want to improve on smoother transition. I would like to describe food as a future topic for my blog because it is one of the hardest and most fun things to write about. I believe this blog would greatly contribute to my growth in writing.