Reflection Prompts...Last Blog...YEY!!

1. What are your plans as a writer (how do you expect to use writing in your future)?
I would like to become a writer of children's literature some day and I believe that this course helped me reflect on my past, especially when it came to doing our daily journals during the beginning of class. The writing prompts/questions allowed me to gather and create very useful lists that I can go back to in the future! Hopefully I can write a story about my experience living in Hawaii and the hurricane...the two subjects that I've talked extensively on during class discussions.

As an aspiring teacher, I would like to take what I've learned in this class to motivate my future students. I would like to use the same techniques used by the professor in getting my students to think and reflect on their own lives to create moving stories about the one thing that they're experts of...themselves!

2. Describe any changes in your writing style
I had a terrible experience in one of my previous writing courses a few semesters ago and that pretty much crushed my dreams of being a writer. This class allowed me to rethink my dream by writing about things that were of importance to me...myself! (hehe) In my previous classes, I always focused on creating stories for children. Since the assignments in this class made us think about our lives, I began to reflect on the experiences I had in the past. Just like what I said earlier, the lists helped me generate ideas for the essays.

3. Describe any changes in your writing process
This class taught me how to brainstorm and create lists to write about experiences that are important to me. I learned that I really have to think first before writing anything down. I reflected on my experiences first and really had to give some thought into it because our essays required that we find a focus in our paper. This class taught me how to brainstorm and create lists to write about an experience that is important to me.

4. Describe any changes in your attitude toward/interest in/understanding of writing in general, and CNF in particular.
When we made lists for our daily journals and had to reflect on our writing, I became interested in my own life. It made me realize that I actually have some good stories and experiences that I can share with the world! Just like what Meagan and Shannon said earlier, you motivated us to write! You motivated us to be interested in writing, and for this, I am forever grateful!!

5. What have you learned about yourself as a writer?
That I'm not so bad after all. Writing is a process and it takes some time. If you write more, you learn more, and this exactly what we did! Even though it took some time to reflect on my life to make my story better and actually have a focus to my writing, all that time spent sitting in front of the computer or stairing into space really helped me!

6. What features of your writing do you feel are most important for you to work on?
I noticed that my papers don't have a lot of dialogue because I'm not good when it comes to remembering things verbatim. I remember the experience and can write about that, but the dialogue is missing. I've noticed in the previous readings we've had that the addition of dialogue is what brings the paper to life and grabs the reader's attention and encourages them to read more. If I'm going to be an author of children's literature, I need to include dialogue so that kids will want to read the book.

Even though we were given some time to reflect on our writing, I feel that we didn't have enough time to really work on our essays...well for me personally. I was bogged down with a lot of assignments from my other course that I kind of let things slide with regards to this course. But yea...time flies when you're having fun! If only I had more time to reflect and work on my personal essays -- maybe it would have been different.