Personal Narrative: My Senior Composition Class

How good can I be at writing, I thought I was amazing, this semester showed me there is always room for improvement.Coming into a senior composition class to learn about the best format to write papers is stressful, especially for a slam poet. I hadn’t really learned a lot about my professional writing before. I always thought I was a wiz at correctly writing complex papers. I read some of my old writing recently, it’s atrocious. From my atrocious writings of yesterday to the writings of tomorrow, I have certainly climbed the ranks to better writing since taking this class.
Climbing the ranks is certainly what I did when I stopped citing things directly and paraphrasing them for my own writing. I never learned how to cite things through paraphrasing
Before this class I didn’t know what parallelism was, now I'm sliding parallelism into almost every paper like it were second nature. I have gotten so much better with commas. In the beginning, I used far too many commas; I made jokes about being the Oprah of commas, “You get a comma! You get a comma! Everybody’s getting commas!” This went on for years, until this class, as I wrote I learned more about where commas should and shouldn’t be placed. I learned so much about commas that I have started to feel worse about my older papers -- sometimes to the point of cringing. One can see my ability with commas has improved when comparing my first paper, the compare and contrast, to my final individual paper, the movie review. In my first paper one can find commas like one would find blades of grass on a soccer field, abundant and strewn throughout. For instance in this one sentence I wrote, “the Status Audio OB-1 are a better pair of headphones for the average listener, as compared to, the Audio Technica ATH-M50X.” This sentence contains two commas, one of which is unnecessary. Commas used to be my safety blanket, now they are what they should have been all along, a tool for