I feel like I have grown a lot as a writer. At first I felt like I was struggling to write a good essay for my classes in high school and while I did well in the classes via grade wise, I felt like I was barely getting through and was just winging it. I also felt like writing got more annoying with all these new sentence enhancers and the teachers at the time were basically forcing the class to use them in their work even though they did not really change much in a sentence in day to day life. However in college, I feel like I understand why we use such sentence enhancers and why they are important to use when writing a paper, a book or just daily life. I feel like my Writing class in college helped me overall become a better writer for multiple forms of writing such as personal stories, rhetorical essays and research essays.
The writing course I took in college helped me make my personal stories even better than they used to be. Back in the day, I would just write what happened and that would be it. However now I use sensory details in my writing. Sensory details are details that help the reader understand the detail of something in the story by putting in details that trigger a sense in the reader’s five senses. An example of this is saying “I love my grandma’s cooks since they smell very fresh”. This give the reader an idea of how the cookies smell and it paints a picture in the reader’s head on how they look and even taste. In my personal story assignment, I used a lot of these sensory details in my writing. An example of this is “ We also have the Spain game show channel and every Friday night we would watch the Spain version of Wheel of Fortune. The host always wears a suit just like the American version but the host also has a big brown beard. Me and my family always try to solve the word puzzle before the contestants can solve it“. You can see that I help the reader paint a picture on how the host looks and a scene of a family having a family competition on who can solve the puzzle first.
The writing course I took in college helped me make my rhetorical essays better as well. I would just choose the easiest rhetorical devices and call it a day but now after my college course I now deeply think about what devices are in play. I had to do an essay on a text I liked and I wrote about the Neon Genesis Evangelion Manga and I used a lot of rhetorical devices in my essay. An example of this is allusion “The major source of allusion in the manga is the angels. Even though the angels aren’t real angels, they reference the biblical angels and they mimic those powers. An example of this is Ramiel, the 5th angel, who is a giant blue diamond that shoots high-energy lasers. Ramiel in the bible is the angel of thunder and lighting and this connects with Ramiel from the manga as they both shoot high power energy attacks.”
Finally, the writing course I took in college helped me improve my research essays. I would just put evidence and give a little explanation and call it a day but now I use evidence to try to show what the author who made the evidence I use was trying to continue to their audience in their article/essay. An example of this is “He uses a shocked tone for his audience, the readers of Marketing Dive, and others who are interested in video games and how microtransactions are affecting video games.“