The Reflective Essay : Becoming a University Writer

1. The Reflective Essay: Becoming a University Writer Amy Berry Southwest Minnesota State University English 151 College Now Springfield High School December 7, 2012

2. Freshman Writing, or Welcome to the University ‘Discourse Community’ College freshmen students are new members of the university community. You are ‘newbies’ learning the ‘ropes’ of academic thinking, writing, and research. You are learning what your readers and listeners expect of you

3. The Reflective Essays The writing reflections in this course are designed to give you the time and the space to reflect on, analyze, and make sense of your experience in the research and writing process After your experiences this term, you are no longer ‘newbies’ The reflective essays help you to understand your experiences

4. Reflecting on Each Assignment: Process Reflecting on your writing process helps you to understand yourself and your experiences—and to make improvements that help you to grow as a writer At the end of each major essay assignment, you have an opportunity to think about and write about your experience You have been developing research and writing skills. What processes did you develop? What parts of the process are strong and worked well? What parts of the process need improvement and change?

5. Reflecting on the Written Essay What parts of the process helped you to write strong sections of your essays? How can you build on these effective writing processes to become a better writer? What parts of the process created weaker sections of the essays? What do you need to do to improve those weaker parts of the process?

6. The Most Important Lesson What is the most important thing you learned about yourself as a writer? As a writer, where do you want to go from here? How did this experience, and this course, help you to become a better writer? Do you feel more prepared for college writing tasks after taking the course? How? Why?

7. The Final Reflective Essay The final reflective essay is your time to make sense of your experience in class this semester and to tell the story of your becoming a college writer.

8. The Most Important Lesson What is the most important thing you learned about yourself as a writer? As a writer, where do you want to go from here? How did this experience, and this course, help you to become a better writer? Do you feel more prepared for college writing tasks after taking the course? How? Why? What was easy? What was difficult?

9. Tell a Story, Find those Metaphors • Think of your overall experience in the course. What is the story of your becoming a college writer in this course? What is the most important lesson or lessons you learned? • Get a good sense of the total experience from beginning to end and communicate it to your reader • What was the experience like? Find a metaphor (for me, becoming a college writer was like…)

10. Start from the Beginning of the Story • Start from the beginning. What did you think and feel about the course, writing, and research at the beginning of the semester? How did you begin to understand the assignments? How to do research? How to plan, write and revise the essays?

11. Move through the Assignments and use them as Illustrations • Use examples from one or more of the assignments to tell the story of how you have become a college writer • Evaluate—how far have you come in the journey toward becoming a college writer? What have you done and learned? What do you still need to do and learn?

12. Assess Your Success Evaluate your success in the course What did you do well? What are you proud of ? What could you have done better? How can you make improvements to succeed at a higher level in your next writing assignments?

13. Advice for Incoming Freshman Writers Now, you have experience as a college writer What advice do you have for students who are coming into the freshman writing class after you? What do you wish you had known, what skills do you wish you had BEFORE the class began?