Semester Retrospective

Semester Retrospective - Sophia Richards

My first assignments of the year were definitely not my best work. The only writing I had done before this was high school English assignments, scholarship essays, and a few odd assignments in the first semester of college. I had never really thought about my voice as a writer until this class, because had I never really needed to. Book reports and one-page papers never really needed a unique or interesting voice. Well, maybe they did, and I just didn’t do it. Either way, I did not have any idea what my voice as a writer was at the beginning of this semester. At the start of the class, my assignments were just barely scraping by. I would not give myself very good grades on these assignments. They weren’t terrible per se, but they just weren’t my best work. The one on one meeting helped me realize this. After the meeting, I really tried to incorporate the criticisms I received into my work. Looking back on my earlier assignments on my blog, I realize that my earlier writing pieces are hard to read because I wish I would have put more time, effort, and thought into them. 

I would like to note that my grammar, punctuation, and spelling have been practically immaculate throughout my assignments this semester. That is something I take great pride in. I wouldn’t really say that my grammar, punctuation, and spelling has improved much over the semester. Maybe just a little, after learning about AP style. 

            Looking back on the semester, I am proud of how far I have come with my writing and how I have grown. I no longer put the bare minimum into my writing and I try to put my best work into each and every assignment now. 

            The assignment that I felt I did the best on was the Twitter assignment. It was also the assignment that I thought was the most fun out of all of the assignments I have completed this semester. I thought it was extremely relevant to the real world and really demonstrated what someone working as a journalist might have to write on a daily basis. Social media is a huge part of news nowadays, and this assignment really helped translate the news into a very modern format, Twitter. I personally get a lot of my daily news from Twitter, but I had never really given much thought into the process of describing the news story in a single tweet.