This year in Mr. Fielder’s class I learned a lot. First I learned how to eliminate clutter when you’re writing a piece to make it better. Instead of having stuff like really or a lot, you just get right to the point and say what you want and it makes your piece of writing sound and look a lot better. I think this helped me out a lot with my writing because I was one of those kinds of people who used a lot of clutter, but now that I learned this, I think my writing piece got a lot better. An example is this, I’m going shopping today to find some new and improved clothes that I really like a lot so it will be a lot of fun. That’s what I use to write like, now this is me; I’m going shopping today to fine clothes that I like so it will be fun.
Another thing I learned was to really focus on one part of a story instead of just wondering off and writing something that didn’t make a lot of sense to the paper. I realized how bad my writing was when I came to this class, but now it seems like I can get right to the point in a paper I write instead of just wondering off. An example of this would be the memoirs we wrote on the first day of school. When I first wrote it, it was bad and I just wrote what happened throughout the whole day and didn’t really focus on anything good, I was just telling little bits and pieces that didn’t make a lot of sense. After when I went back and re did it, I just focused in on the morning up to when I first got to school and it helped me write a more clear story and its made you actually want to read it.
I was never really good at writing a thesis, or even really didn’t know what it even was. I learned how to write a good one this semester and it makes my writing a lot better and it makes me feel better about my writing. When I use to write a piece, I never had much of a thesis, I would usually just jump right into what I was talking about and it never made any sense. Also I didn’t know you were supposed to expand off your thesis, but now I do and it makes my work a lot better. An example of this was the Iran paragraphs we had to write. The thesis was, “In this situation with Iranians nuclear weapons, the U.S should just leave the Iranians alone.
When I use to read articles I would just read them because I had to and I never really took the time to actually focus in on what it was about. What really helped me with that was the margin notes that we had to take. I felt like it made me focus on my writing a lot more and take notes on what I was writing about. One major article that the margin notes helped me with was the Introduction to Rwanda. I started reading it, and it didn’t make much sense to me, but as I read and focused and took notes, I started getting it and it helped me out.
The last major thing I have learned was how to use apostrophes and when to use them. Before, I use to just put apostrophes where ever and I didn’t really know for sure if it belonged there or not. I learned how to show ownership like Zaid’s house or if you’re talking about someone and u want to say Joneses but that isn’t a word, so you would put Jones’ instead to make it sound better. It really made me focus on how to use them and it helped out a lot.