What Haven't You Learned?

I’ve learned a tremendous amount this fall semester in Writing 140. As expected, I grew tremendously as a writer. But I was most impressed with my ability, with the help of Professor Adler, to hone in on the writing process itself. I learned how to effectively use all my time and make completely sure that at certain stages of the process, my paper was where it needed to be. I learned to plan ahead, do thorough research and ultimately write an articulate paper that is both argumentative and cohesive.

As for writing the literal paper, I learned a lot about formatting the overall paper, each paragraph and even each sentence. The detail in which we covered formatting gave me the confidence to dive more into my thoughts and thoroughly analyze knowing at the very least my formatting was effective. Once I learned to master the art of formatting, we dove into other aspects of the paper, such as the thesis, topic sentences and transitions. We took it slow and learned simple aspects of the thesis from our course book before we put it all together to make a complete, articulate thesis. I learned how to effectively use both topic sentences and methods of transition so that my paper, though it may have numerous points with different forms of evidence, flowed fluidly and correctly illustrated my argument.  There are other small things that I received in my edited papers that helped my paper greatly though the pointers seem to be small, and not need much change. Though I learned a lot about writing, one thing that I learned that I think is most important is knowing and understanding that your paper can always improve, and furthermore no matter how much you improve as a writer there are always things you can polish and improve in hopes of growing into a young Ernest Hemingway.