My Journey Through Humanities

Over the course of this semester, I bettered my writing and my reading comprehension. At the start of my semester, the goal that I wanted to achieve by the end of the semester was to better my writing skills and make my writing more organized, which for a draft I might have written in a disorganized way but for final drafts, I handed in my most organized way, and with every assignment, my organization skills of my writing improved. As to drafts, editing, and revising, I choose to write out all of my essays when the first draft is due so I can truly get all the feedback I can possibly get before I tun in my final draft. This was a personal growth for me from the last semester, Where I would just write a little bit of my essay to get revisions for that little bit of writing I would write. 

In the past semesters with past writing classes, I struggled with rhetorical terms but specifically, I struggled with the audience part of it but throughout this semester I think I was truly able to understand and put it to use in my writing throughout this semester. While writing our argumentative research essay we learned how to formulate and articulate a stance on picking an argument. It was not an easy task in order to create a research question off of a theme in a book, then stick to an argument from then but I do think that struggling to do this process brought me closer to truly understanding how to formulate and articulate a stance in my writing. 

Coming from a place where I already understood how to use the databases provided by the school’s library I would definitely say that I familiarized myself more with the database while writing papers during the semester in this class, in fact, I found myself narrowing down the results of my searches using the online databases. Even then after you find potential sources you have to read them and decide if they fit in your writing, as writing you will be doing your best to integrate the things you understand from the reading and either paraphrasing or quoting it in your writing. I personally found myself paraphrasing most of the information that I wanted to include in my writing, simply because I have gotten better at saying something in my own way but still being able to get the point across, which is something I had gotten more comfortable doing this semester. Along with finding sources, you want to put into the essay you need to cite them, my sense of writing in MLA and citing in MLA has certainly improved since last semester because I am using it so much it has become second nature, of course, I still tend to make minor mistakes here and there but overall there has been a major growth. Learning and finally comprehending these things during this semester has definitely made my reading and comprehension skills better and more efficient.