Leon 1

Maritza Leon Cartagena

Mrs. Watkins
MWF 9:30 am Comp I
9 December 2015
Writing Journey
What drives you forward to keep writing what is on your mind? Mr. Taylor, my English
teacher in high school, once said, Because something is hard, you should not avoid it to be
successful. These are the words that make me the person and the writer I am today. Part of good
writing is having good grammar and having an idea that will transport the reader to that story.
When I started writing in English, I still thought in Spanish and I had never written an essay
before. Until I came to United States, I did not know any English words or how to build a
sentence. In just a year I went from knowing nothing to being able to write a seven page essay. In
my writing I have had to fight the language barrier.
The easiest process for me of writing is building ideas. I have had a lot of good writings
in college as well as bad ones. Ironically, the ones I think are bad are actually considered good
and the ones I consider good are only considered acceptable. This has driven me to the
conclusion that I see myself improving and have been able to write more and also learn in
college. My writing is still a work in progress but I believe it will get better with the time.
Everybody has weakness and strengths that determine which their best writing are and worst
ones. In my case I believe my weakness is grammar and mechanics and my strength is the
content.
Consequently, the ideas should be written in a way that the reader can clearly follow. In
my case, even from the very beginning, my writing is very specific and can support my ideas. An
example could be this sentence from my essay called The American Dream Drowning with
Inequality. I used the fact that Only 14% percent of Latino fourth graders are reading at
proficient levels and 57% are below even in basic levels often this means that students are unable
to read in either English or Spanish. (Hill and Kathryn 95) to support my statement that

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students that are born and raised in their native country and then come to the US are more likely
to drop out. My teachers praise my ability to build up a topic out of any situation. The
American Dream Drowning With Inequality and The Teachers That Will Never Be Forgotten are
both essays that I wrote based on conversations with people that did not relate to the topic of
writing essays. My best features are the ones I was thoughtful and used experience in my past
essays.
My best writing in college was the American dream essay. In this essay I wrote about
different aspects that make the American dream unreachable. I believe that this essay was one of
my best because, I was able to explain my views and personal experience while also supporting
the essay with research. In this essay my thesis statement was really solid and to the point. My
thesis was Society has always believed that race, immigrants, and social classes are influence by
inequality which keeps them from achieving their American dream. I had a lot of ideas and
opinions on this topic because it was personal to me. It is one of my strengths because it is based
on research and is not a personal narrative. This essay was my best one because I spent a lot of
time revising it and finished it before the deadlines. What made me most confident in this paper
was I had a professional tutor edit my revisions. I enjoyed writing this essay and consider this
essay as the best one I have ever written.
However, I feel that I usually have more weakness than strength in my writing due to my
language barrier. My vocabulary is not as extensive as others that were raised or have been in the
United States longer. Sometimes it is a little bit difficult for me to determine the difference in
what is wrong or right in a sense of grammar. My most common problem is in commas and
tenses. An example of my error in pronoun adjective agreement and commas splices in my
American Dream essay was the sentence, My perspective of an influential teacher is the teacher
that can influence hearts and believes, in you, supports you, in ways that they become family to

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their students. I also have difficulty in talking about myself or writing in first person. My ideas
do not flow together and I fall victim to mental block. Talking about others and what I see is
easier than writing about myself. My weakness in grammar and mechanics are a work in
progress that I have been working on for three years.
The essay that I feel needed the most work was Others in Our Life. In this essay I wrote
about myself and what shaped me as a person. While I was writing this, I thought that the ideas
in this essay were good, but looking back, the ideas didnt flow together like I hoped. Even
though I finished this essay ahead of the deadline, I had to shorten it significantly since I had so
much to say. This caused a lot of grammar errors and made in it the worst essay I have written in
college. I also had several people help me with revising part of my paper which gave my paper
several different voices. This essay was difficult for me because I was evaluating myself and the
requirements restricted me more than in the other essays.
Overall, I see myself as a writer in college as a work in progress. I still need practice to
perfect my grammar skills, but college has helped me greatly in improving my writing. As a
writer, I am organized and specific with a lot of structure. I believe my weaknesses outweigh my
strengths, but I have had a lot of good essay as well as bad essays. Usually I go to multiple
people for help on revision. However, it is when I ask multiple people that I usually get bad
grades because it is not in my own voice. Sometime revising it myself with one person helps me
finish and yields better results. Evaluating myself as a writer helps me to see that as a writer I
have a lot to learn and I would like to become better. I believe that writing has the power of
conveying beliefs, views, and ideas to the reader without changing the readers own beliefs and
ideas. I use my writing to express what shaped me to be who I was, am, and will be. In every
essay, my opinion is involved because that adds credibility. Due to that, my writings in college

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all have been about when I came to America and how that experience shaped me for the better.
My writing is not perfect but I always assure that it comes from my heart.