When I first came into Ball State, I wasn’t much of a writer. During high school I never pushed myself to become a better writer or even challenge myself in the English subject. I always took the “easy” English classes, because I felt that I wasn’t good at English and couldn’t get a good grade in the honors English classes. Taking this class I figured out that I actually enjoyed writing a little bit, and I wasn’t that bad at it. I don’t feel as if I have really applied myself in this class as I could have, but I still got a pretty decent grade, and I got pretty good grades on all of my essays.
Writing the essays came very natural to me for some reason. I didn’t spend a lot of time on any of the essays, and I got a pretty good grade on all of them. If I would have really applied myself to the two that we could have revised, I feel as if I could have gotten an A on both of them easily. Instead, I decided to be lazy and not edit one of them, and to do very little editing to the other one. This was just me being lazy and not wanting to do it, because I had plenty of time to do both of them, but I decided that the grade I got was good enough for me.
My writing process has changed just because of these blog posts. I used to always just pick a topic, then not think about what I was going to write until the night before it was due. With the blog posts, I would choose my topic, and then write about it a little bit way before it was due. I even wrote part of some of my papers in the blog post we would do. I really enjoyed doing these blog posts actually. It kept me thinking about my essay, and it was an easy five points every time we had one.
I think the most challenging thing about the class was the final essay. For a long time I had no idea what to write about. My blog posts grade even took a hit, because I wasn’t doing them because I didn’t know what to write about. Once I got my topic, I wrote the paper in one sitting, rather fluently with no blocks.
If I could tell the next 103 students anything about the class, it would be to relax. I came into college really stressed out, because all you hear is how hard college is. To me, the hardest part has been applying myself. When I have applied myself, I haven’t had one bad grade, it is when I don’t apply myself that gets me into trouble.
One thing I learned from this class was to plan my writing ahead of time. I never planned anything until we started these blog posts. I appreciate writing these posts, and I actually enjoy writing them most of the time. I hope as my time goes on at Ball State, I will continue to plan ahead my writing and make it easy for myself.
I really did enjoy this class, even though I didn’t want to come someday’s. This class felt like a relief to some of my other classes. I have some classes where I will go into the class, and the teacher will lecture the whole time making it very boring. With this class I felt it was a good balance of teaching and having some fun. I felt as if I learned, while actually enjoying sitting in the class.
Nick Wilson 