Wow! After spending a whole school year in English 11, I can proudly say that my reading, writing, and thinking skills are the strongest they have been in my entire life. Goodbye to those misspelled words and my terrible writing from the past! In my English 11 class, we discussed topics such as the fast food industry to alienation from society, and much more. As a reader, writer and thinker, I've changed in many different yet important ways. In the past, I had a hard time with "reading between the lines ", writing essays under pressure, forming my own opinions about certain topics, integrating quotes as forms of evidence, etc. Now, I know how to do all of that efficiently and effectively. I have grown as a reader in my ability to analyze, annotate and understand texts, as a writer to revise and rethink what I write, and as a thinker to form my own opinion about a certain topic.
When I first started this class, I honestly wasn't expecting to do all the work that I ended up doing in just one regular English class. But it was all worth it at the end. I enjoy reading as a person. But when it came to analyzing and annotating text, I was clueless. As a reader, I never made this kind of approach towards understanding texts, and I later felt that I wasn't really gaining much out of any of the books that I had managed to finish. But after a few lessons in class about different techniques to truly understand what you're reading about, it made me think a lot more differently. Now whenever I pick up a book, I get more than I had anticipated before I learned about analyzing and annotating texts. Because of this, I now notice the little things that change the whole meaning of the book, while making reading a lot more interesting. As I now enjoy reading more than before, I've also found writing to be very neat too.
My writing has gotten better and more thorough, because I have learned how to re-write and make my essays better.
