I have acquired a variety of abilities throughout this course, including listening, critical thinking, reading, speaking, and writing. After completing the course's numerous practises and graded assignments, I no longer feel anxious to produce a piece. I gained knowledge on how to effectively employ structure, literary devices, and various sentence structures to strengthen my work and support my thesis. Since the beginning of this semester, I have dramatically improved my writing abilities and learned how to acknowledge my effort accurately.
In addition, throughout the course, my creative writing has undergone a significant transformation. Looking back at my first creative writing essay from this course, I can see how much I have learned about how to accurately explain the story and captivate the reader by using a variety of punctuation, sentence styles, and language features.
Additionally, at the beginning of the term, I thought I could write an analytical essay efficiently, but I have since realized that in order to evaluate a piece of work thoroughly, numerous interpretations must be finished and connected to the thesis using a particular structure. I also learned the importance of ensuring everything is written in a way that is appropriate for the intended audience.
ENG4U has stressed the growth of my ability to read, communicate, think critically, and use the creative thinking skills required for success at university, in my daily life, and possibly in Writers Craft. The ability to write, read, and speak with sophistication is crucial to my decision to become a doctor. I'm grateful for the approaches taught in ENG4U because I know they'll benefit me in the future.
The following five articles are the assignments I am most proud of.
The poetry comparison essay is considered an analytical writing piece. In theory, analytical writing is evaluating a given piece. However, it is so much more; it is the ability to go beyond the descriptive presentation of facts or details to the reader and evaluate/investigate their significance. Although this is a concept that I initially struggled with as I had trouble going deeper into certain meanings and providing enough detail in my analysis', the poetry essay proved that I had finally learned the proper, structured way to analyze a piece. Specifically, I learned how to analyze and compare each text with respect to the poet's use of language features - metaphors, similes, alliteration, repetition, and allusions - and structural features - enjambments, caesura, end-stoped line, and rhyming. This allowed me to form multiple different interpretations for a given quote. Furthermore, this assignment in particular was extremely interesting to me as I had the opportunity to become educated on the different eras in which Joanne Arnott and William Wordsworth wrote. The combination of my interest, confidence and new knowledge allowed me to recieve a 100% on this assignment.
I was also very proud of my work on this assignment as it was one of the first assignments we did that was graded. I learned many new aspects of writing a review covering topics I had never thought to include before this course. For instance, I learned the importance of proving the article did/did not meet its purpose for its intended audience through the use of quotes and language features. Another important aspect of writing a review critique that I recently learned was the significance of analyzing specific excerpts to prove my thesis. This review critique was about a Charles Dickens walking tour in London which was a bit difficult to review as I do not have general knowledge of Dickens or London. However, I knew that as long as I discussed every aspect of writing a review critique that I learned, I would be fine.
Before attending ENG3U, I had never heard of or written an annotated bibliography. Throughout both ENG3U and ENG4U, I have learned how to write one correctly and am very proud of how far I have come. I was able to grasp the importance of interpreting quotes to support my thesis and how crucial the source's reliability is. For this piece, I found it interesting to see how many different literary scholars on JSTOR shared the same theories and thesis' as me about King Lear. I was able to show my knowledge of King Lear through the analysis' I made of the quotes from the secondary sources. Most importantly, when writing an annotated bibliography, I was enlightened on the appropriate ways to summarize, assess, and reflect on a source.
This assignment required me to rewrite a section of A Christmas Carol using the same structure and word choices as the author, Charles Dickens. This was another important assignment for me as I felt like a true writer since I was rewriting a story with a significant meaning. For this piece, I had to research Dickens' reasoning for writing this book, allowing me to write in a way that meets the purpose of his writing. Determining the sentence type, punctuation, and overall structure used was extremely important in this piece as I had to match Dickens' style. After this assignment was completed, I felt extremely satisfied with my piece, and this was reflected in my grade, which was 98%.
This assignment was difficult as this analysis of an excerpt from A Christmas Carol was completed without seeing the excerpt beforehand; no previous research was allowed. I had to quickly understand and learn what an analysis must include. It was a given that it needed to include quotes and context; however, I learned that it also must consist of a target audience, a structure analysis, language analysis, and multiple different interpretations for one quote. This piece made me proud because it was when I realized that I was learning something new in every assignment. Moreover, this assignment allowed me to feel confident in my writing as I could see that although I went in blind, I was still able to properly and effectively analyze the excerpt.
My website has been ongoing since the beginning of ENG3U, and I have been adding my new assignments to it as frequently as possible as I enjoy seeing my works on something I created. The home page of my website is simplistic and calming as I have the main colour theme being a very light, peaceful blue. Moreover, I learned about many important aspects of writing, and my word art has reflected these on my home page. I enjoy everything about my website: the colour, the pictures, and my pieces. However, one aspect of my website that I particularly enjoy is how I have set up my blog page with many pieces in different categories and one general page with all my writing works.
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