Draft of First Essay

I attended Normal Community High School in Normal Illinois. I absolutely loved my high school, but many of the reasons I loved the school were social reasons and I never actually thought about the quality of the academics. According to the Illinois’ State Board of Education about 60% of Normal Community’s students graduate versus the state average of 46%. With over 2,000 students in attendance most people would conclude that means the school seems to be doing an above average job, but I’m not sure that above average is adequate enough to fully prepare a student for higher education.

It is possible that the 40% who did not graduate may have just struggled in some classes. The school has multiple departments and every department has a multitude of classes including many advance placement classes (AP). I myself took many business classes and AP classes to personally prepare myself for college as a business major. After four years of being in the classrooms of every department I noticed a trend in the teaching styles of the different departments and how it affects the students. In Social Studies classes or Business courses the teachers had a genuine passion for what they were teaching, helping make even history or accounting interesting. I loved courses within these departments and got some of my best grades and still remember the majority of what I learned in those classes. Although the complete opposite attitude existed in the Math and Science departments, and that caused students to share work and avoid taking an interest in the material. Personally I was not able to connect with my senior year math teacher, and I am now struggling to remember basic functions in my college math courses.

I am prepared to work hard for the things I love, but in college I will not love every class and I will have to teach myself to work hard in the things I find uninteresting because I was not prepared for actual work in those subjects. This has affected me as a college student already and I have had to adjust my study habits to meet the demands of my classes. As an individual I am a hard worker so I believe I can work hard in every subject but it has been a long time since I have had to truly study. I found high school to be quite easy if I just went to school and did the work I was told to do. I rarely ever had to seek outside help, visit professors or spend hours to reach the level of perfection I wanted to achieve. This is going to be entirely new to me and I am nervous, overwhelmed and I wish I had been slightly more prepared for the heavy load of studying that comes with college.

I came to Old Dominion University from a wonderful environment but I did not come from a mythical high school that made me 100% ready to take on college. The majority of the students at Normal Community were college bound and like me understood that we would not be baby fed our degree and I believe that is how Normal Community prepared me that most. After four years of high school I know where my education was strongly built and where it is weak, and I can take care of those areas for myself.

This is the first essay I turned in for the UNIV150 course. My professor commented on my lack of comma usage. Fragmented segments and rambling sentences.

Reflective Essay –

Writing has never been my favorite subject and I was often filled with dread when asked to write a paper for a class in the past. It was not that I hated writing my ideas on paper or that I could not think of a topic to write about. I had ideas spilling out of head, but I couldn’t structure a paper in a way that would earn me a high grade. I may have had an A+ idea, but I had so many grammatical errors that there was no way a teacher could pass my paper. That is why I was placed in UNIV150. When I took my writing sample placement test in the summer I was so focused on the material and what I wanted to say that I lost all structure within my paper. There was no paragraph organization and there were constant grammatical errors in my sentences.

During this class we were asked to write four essays before this reflective essay and in each essay I made every similar mistakes. The greatest mistakes I would make in my essays were comma placement. Knowing when to use commas and when to not use commas has always been a fault of mine. My high school English teacher told me I write like I talk, the only pauses I take are for breathing. I did not have the natural pause to help me hear where commas should go. In essay one alone I had sixteen instances where I either needed a comma or used one when I should have left it without. In essay two I again had multiple sentence structure errors but I used the professor’s comments and edited my draft. Fixing those errors raised the quality of my essay and I earned an A. I slowly understood when to use commas thanks to the documents provided to the class that explains when commas are appropriate.

Writing papers in this class has helped me improve my skills as a write, but I also gained knowledge from the book. The Transition to College Writing taught me about when to use certain types of writing like arguments and comparison writing. There was also a very helpful chapter on writing research papers that I think will help me in the future when I am assigned a research paper. The book also explained why the tradition five paragraph essay I was taught in high school may not always be the best approach to a prompt. The ideas and solutions this book provides will help me throughout my entire college career.

Even though I feel as if I have improved my structural skills through this semester in this class I still need to work on my grammatical errors. Each paper I have made less mistakes, but the mistakes are still made. Now that I know using commas is an area where I struggle in writing I can look for those errors specifically in my papers. Looking for my known weaknesses in my papers and using the knowledge provided by The Transition to College Writing I have gained valuable skills in this class.