English has never been an interest of mine. I speak it and text with it, read manga and the subtitles of animes. I do not enjoy writing paragraphs with them. Having to extend a simple idea that could have been told in just a sentence to paragraphs was just foolish in my mind, a waste of time I thought, for both the ones writing and the ones reading. My goals for english was kind of lazy, I vaguely remember saying in the beginning of class when asked of my goals that I wanted to be able to write more, to be able to extend the length of my ideas to over several paragraphs instead of just one, and learn more vocabulary. That goal kind of counteracts with my ideals. I didn’t actually t want to write more but just wanted to pass the class and did not really have a solid goal in my mind. Through the class however, I have learned different abilities. These included enhancing my ways of finding sources, thinking about how to use and analyzing my sources, citing, and quoting. Every time I was assigned an assignment, I would grow weary, thinking how could I achieve that length and amount of words needed, but even with those worry I grow amazed and with a sign of relief that I had finished it and pulled it off.

            Looking back at my first essay I was quite amazed at the length, 1004 words. Perhaps not a big number to other people but to me it was an achievement. To be able to write 1004 words about one topic. Reading through it hit me with a realization, its about what I have experienced, it was about my thoughts and opinions. I had learned how to explain things in great detail and event he surroundings. Writing more is simply a byproduct of the author in the zone, wanting the readers to understand the author’s thoughts and imagery through great details. It sometimes sounds poetic, though I would probably never be super interested in english more than just using it for conveying simple ideas.

            In my second essay, a Op-ed about if government should ban guns, I wrote exactly what I thought of as reasons and try to back it up with examples and evidences from articles. What I feel like I had learned during the period of working on this essay was finding sources. More specifically is finding that magical evidence in a source and attempting to weave that into your essay. Being able to pick out the evidence from the rest of the sources quickly, and precisely, There could be 20 minutes of searching and only finding 1 evidence that you can truly be able to use. I have learned that finding what you want quickly is simply searching for the right keywords and learning to speed read an article. What I think is delicate though is the “weaving” part that I’ve mentioned earlier, trying to seamlessly putting that evidence in and explaining it in such a way that it all fits together and makes perfect sense. That is perhaps the hardest task in my opinion.

            In my honest opinion of what I think writing is and should be, is that it should be whatever the author wants it to be. It is what the writing piece caters to, their audience, and the thought processes of the author, those are what defines writing. For me it is a simple tool that I rather use frequently in conveying messages to my friends and family, not something I really want to use to write incredibly complex research papers using tough vocabulary, if I had the choice of course.