AT&D #13. Professional Writing Reflections

Do you feel as though you’ve made some improvements in your writing in taking a college English class?

Covering the various topics throughout this class, I feel that I learned a lot about professional writing despite being familiar with some of the principles already. With that said, the activities I felt were the most useful to me (that I had little experience with) were constructing business documents. Learning the proper format and writing for various scenarios within those confines was good practice; as a result, I am now more prepared for whenever a situation calls in the future where I have to write one of these business-style documents to correctly respond to said situation appropriately.

In regards to the least useful activities, I can’t recall of any that I didn’t think would be helpful in some way or another; each and every writing activity up to this point has helped me strengthen my writing skills comprehensively. Pertaining to my writing skills, I feel that the only improvement I made concerned the versatility of its use. Prior to this English course, the assignments I had done were typical and generic (i.e. just a persuasive paper, just a research paper) whereas this class applied these writing formats and tied them to qualities that would allow an audience to connect more with the subjects I would write about; this made for more interesting and thoughtful writing compositions.

Finally, my thoughts on what I like to see less or more of in this class? There isn’t too much to elaborate on this area; I feel that everything I learned here was for the spirit of improving and utilizing one’s writing creatively (by focusing on proper grammar, subject usage, mechanics of etiquette, etc.). My advice for future students on taking this class is to carefully go over the material within the course and make a judgement on what one already has mastered and what one needs to improve concerning writing. Once a student has learned their shortcomings, they will be allowed to test themselves through the various exercises in this class, which can further aide with developing a style and obtaining the ability to illustrate an idea through just words.