Before I entered ENC2135, my teachers and I usually considered English to be my best subject, Throughout the course, though, I realized I still had a lot to learn. This class showed me how much freedom I actually have in my writing. There are so many more ways to construct a paper than a basic intro – two body paragraph – conclusion outline. I really enjoyed the freedom I had in my writing, and going through the process of writing and rewriting and rewriting again taught me a lot about writing a coherent essay. In my first project, I had a little trouble since the whole point was that it was a narrative. I never really considered myself much of a creative writer. Not much of a writer at all, in fact, my English strength lies in reading comprehension. I’m notoriously bad at constructing sentences in my opinion. After I wrote my very first draft, I realized that I needed tons more details. I added a lot of dates, numbers, and some more quotes. After my conference, I went back with Mat’s advice, and realized I had a lot to change. I feel I learned a lot about constructing a narrative. In my original draft I had sort of repeated myself in an uninteresting way, and I tried to put in a section that talked more about the future than the moment I was talking about in my paper. After I cut those two sections, the paper flowed a lot more nicely, and I felt like I understood more what the point of a narrative was. Now, if I had trouble with my narrative, then I REALLY had trouble with my research paper. In my research paper, I had a really hard time choosing a research question. Originally, it was really broad, which made it very hard to form an argument around. Also, at first I was very cautious and followed the outline on the syllabus very closely. Mistake! The point of this class as I found out is to construct your paper in a way that works for your topic. Because I was following the outline so closely, my paper ended up being very fragmented, and I had a really hard time sticking to one tone. Most importantly, it really didn’t have an argument. It was kind of just a lot of research thrown together. After I got a 70 on my original paper, I was determined to get a better grade on the next one. At first, I tried to find a better way to answer original research question, but I couldn’t find a way to make it work. Next came a lot of reevaluating of the content and the layout. I went through copious amounts of paper trying to plan each specific section. I already had all the research done, I just had to figure out how I could rework it to fit the content of the new paper. I especially had a hard time figuring out how to actually make an argument. After four years of high school writing, I simply had no idea you could have an argument without a thesis. As I wrote each section of the paper, though, it started to get a little bit easier. I realized changing around the layout to something that flowed well with my ideas made it sound so much better. My argument and research summary morphed into one thing, but that ended up working out for the better. Overall, throughout both projects, I really enjoyed the process of constructing them and learning how to be a better writer instead of following one specific format.