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Joining on late in the discussion here, but I would like to share that this year taught me that I am capable of challenging myself in new areas that I never thought were possible! My writing in English has always been OK compared to my Israeli peers because of my Israeli American upbringing, but I learned so much about structuring a precise, well-thought and 'proper' essay. I learned that I actually know absolutely NOTHING about writing, especially in English (I was basing everything on vibes up until now), and was able to acquire valuable tools that will help me express myself better in the future. I think that I still struggle with grammar and punctuation at time and developing ideas that are strong and original. Structuring my essays and understanding what a reader may be looking for was definitely a challenge as well. Hopefully with time and practice I can strengthen those too. Thank you, Taylor, for a great semester, and to all of you for being a supportive, positive group to work in!

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Amelia Needle

I've found recently that exploratory writing helps me come up with ideas and helps me organize my thoughts. I think this is a tool I'll be taking onward as I continue to grow as a writer. Additionally, I've worked on being more intentional with my word choices and sentence structure in order to convey complex thoughts. Coming up with specific synonyms has been fun for me. I think by doing this during timed writing exercises has given me more confidence in my decisions, organizational skills, vocabulary, and spelling.

Despite my confidence in the more technical side of academic writing, I still struggle with expanding my analysis by thinking through my ideas and fleshing them out properly. During timed writing exercises I often forget to sufficiently explain the points I'm trying to make which end up just missing the mark. I think that exploratory writing will help me remedy this shortcoming.

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If you would asked me in the beggining of this year if I would be able to write an essay with more than 800 words in English I would have laugh at you. In the beggining of the first semester I thought to give up on English and maybe this is not for me. And here I am, able to whole essays, able to read complicated poems, stories, and write about them. I have learned how to read between the lines of the text, how to write more efficiently and I improved my writing skills by so much levels. Getting good feedback on my writing gave me back the confidence in my English that I came with in the beggining.

I think the one thing that really opened my eyes this course was the realization that you can write your essays in much more compelling way, by adressing the reader with questions and thoughts.

I still have long way to go, I still have grammer and spelling errors, my vocabulary isn't wide enough, and my writing is still messy and repetetive sometimes.

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to be honest, never have i thought i will be this humbled in a course, but it is a relief to know that I am doing better day after day lol. though i know i have a lot of work to do when it comes to grammar and vocabulary, i try to write the best i can and make progress. so ye, i might have had a rough start at the beginning of the semester, but i can now feel the wrinkles finally start to form on my brain after being silky smooth for so long, to the point that sometimes i even think about writing stories which is unprecedented since writing and reading was never really my thing to begin with, but i guess it's a good sign for the future :). thank you for the fun class, i think you are the most chill teacher i have ever met so far<3.

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I feel like I've regressed but I know that's probably because I have higher expectations of myself (plus that I've been pretty stressed this semester...). I did improve on my transitions both between paragraphs and in sentence sequencing. I've also gotten a little better at throwing things away; I've deleted several paragraphs on my first essay because they just weren't relevant enough to the thesis statement or could be condenced into a single paragraph. I'm more precise and conscious of reader confusion instead of just assuming that they will catch what I mean without sufficiently referring to my ideas. The secondary sources also made me work on unifying multiple core ideas into the essay, which is something I've been wanting to do.
I still have to work on my ideas and what I can pull out of the texts. I could be more creative while staying more closely with the source text. I need to work on my conclusions; I've been avoiding them because I hate them and feel as if they're pretty pointless unless the essay is long enough for its details to be forgotten by the time you reach the end. Even though I do logically understand their purpose. I also need to work on my introductions, although I feel like I have gotten better at them because multiple sources = more complexity just gives me more need to lead up to my point before making the argument. I feel like I've gotten worse at thesis statements too but that's because the ideas are more complex and it's harder to make a precise and concise thesis statement about them. So that's also something I have to work on. Also lots of language issues... I could go on forever actually.

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Now I can write about stuff I have no clue about (like responses to secondary sources when I had no idea what I was writing about). I can organize better and analyze instead of summarizing. I don’t feel lost now in front of the blank page. I still have a problem with topic sentences, introductions, and conclusions and must work on this.

The thesis statement structure “although/actually” helped me improve my thesis statements and make them stronger.

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Response: My writing skills have definitely improved during the semester. I’m accustomed to writing poems and introspective pieces, but this course was challenging for me because I had to approach writing differently, focusing on paragraph organization and, most importantly, substantiating my point of view by providing numerous examples and evidence, rather than just a single sentence. What was new to me was using secondary sources; I felt that I did well linking two texts together and writing an academic paper. I want to focus more on developing my idea by providing examples, and also to write about the example itself and how it is linked to the topic.

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Meral Haj Yahya

I feel like my writing has improved a lot. Throughout the first and the second semester my writing changed in style and became more efficient, I used to write a lot of redundant things in my essays and the tools of this course helped me get rid of that. I learned to write more analytically rather than summarizing, and the more we practiced in-class writing the more I became experienced in timed writing.

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Honestly. I feel like I'm just confused, only more confused. In a global sense, it seems that my first essay was head and shoulders above all the subsequent ones, because I just don't understand what I'm doing anymore. And in general, It was as if my brain was overloaded more than before, and I was already confused about everything. The problem is not that something is taught wrong, and I hope not that I am not doing enough. But it seems that everything is only getting worse for me, I am starting to get confused about elementary things like the spelling of words and the structure of sentences, I don't know what to do with it, because.. Because. There are too many thoughts in my head, and it is not clear how to organize them and ultimately it is not clear why, I have the feeling that at the end of this course I did not understand at all what they want to hear from us, except for well-designed quotes and the structure of the work. It seemed to me that the point was to talk about non-obvious theories, and not about something that everyone understands, but ultimately It turns out that my perception of the obvious differs from the social and... In short, somehow everything is very bad, I'm stressed before the exam because I am hella confused and feel like everything about me is bad. I can memorize how to format MLA citations But.. I do not know. Everything is too complicated.

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Rivkah

My writing has gotten tighter and more deliberate. (I feel like if I ramble on, I will just be disproving my main point… but I will anyway.)The in-class writing assignments have helped me to take my time as I formulate my sentences, enabling me to be more conscious of the vocabulary, structure, and content I use in the first draft. Certain writing exercises have pushed me to develop my thesis statements further and dig deeper into my initial ideas. I’m still working on redundancy and repetition in my writing. I repeat too much (this time, on purpose ;).

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Hadar Halimi

I definitely improved my organization skills, in my writing and in my thought process. My vocabulary has expanded a lot as well.
There is a lot I still need to work on and get better at. I think most prominent are my spelling and grammar (annoying that’s still a main issue but sadly it is) and my progression of ideas in fleshing out a thesis statement. More construction skills are also heavily required.

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Ariella

I believe i grew as a writer, learned how to write more efficiently and stray less from the topic while staying relevant and knowing how to back up my claims with evidence. I learned how to analyze literary texts and find deeper meaning in texts and to use that and make my observations and thoughts of the texts accessible to others while conveying a broader statement about something larger than just parts of the texts or even the texts themselves, but about themes such as discrimination or society etc.

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Liya Moses

I feel that my confidence in my writing has grown significantly, and I’ve learned how to write even when I don’t feel particularly inspired. I really enjoyed the process of incorporating secondary sources into my essays, it definitely helped me develop as a writer and gave me a better understanding of the broader academic conversation between authors. Moving forward, I’d like to focus on improving technical aspects like grammar, spelling, comma splices, and MLA formatting. I also want to work on varying my sentence structures and experimenting with different techniques, since I sometimes fall into repetitive patterns.