One semester of English 101A at Shepherd University is equivalent to 3 credit hours. Now I am asked to compose this reflective essay to answer the question: How does “3” translate into writing development? My development as a writer has followed a natural progression. Initially, my writing always took a very safe route. I only tackled topics I comprehended fully. Through my time at Shepherd, I have been challenged to write about things I did not understand. Sitting down to write an assignment began to take much longer. I could not sit down with an idea and compose freely. Progressively, I would begin an assignment and draft something shallow, but the initial composition triggered thoughts that would develop after I shut my computer down for the night. Revelations would occur in the moments between sleep and awake, between rinse and repeat, between stir and heat. Some of these …show more content…
I understood my theories were not well supported. However, I still yearned to write out of the safe zone. Understanding the writing process using the course text “They Say / I Say” gave me the permission to use writing for what I had always needed and had recently begun to do. I began to use writing to discover my own thoughts and to piece together parts of my own theories that I was initially been unable to articulate. Using writing to discover was an amazing tool. Too many times in high school I was under the impression that good ideas would come from knowledge and thought, but that they did not require writing to be sorted out. In college, professors explained this, but I was too set in my way to understand exactly what they were encouraging me to do. Finally driven to the process facing abstract ideas, I could no longer get by in writing the simple ideas that first came to me. In this way I find writing more useful for the