The Reflective Essay

Student’s Name
Professor’s Name
Course
Date
Reflective Essay
Reading and essay writing provides one with a tranquility that only the comfort of books can offer. It particularly allows you to focus on your thoughts and your view on the certain subject. The different essays that I have written in this course have enabled me to develop my writing skills in terms of creativity, analytical thinking, and critical thinking. A comparison of the essays that I wrote before going through this course and those that I have written while undertaking this course showcase a growth in my creativity and skills as a writer. This essay provides a reflection of the improvement in my writing skills and the general growth that can be seen in my essays in terms of creativity, critical thinking and other writing skills that I have developed over the course of the semester.
Before beginning any essay, I usually take a few minute to conceptualize the topic and critically think about what I want to write followed by a short outline of what I want to write about in each paragraph. In the essays that I have written this semester, I noted the importance of taking a few minutes before writing to thing about the topic, conceptualize it and come up with a short guiding outline as it ensured that I did not slip off-topic or venture more into one aspect of the essay than the others. Pre-thinking before writing my essays enables me to come up with a few ideas that I may want to incorporate in my essay, write them down and then select those that appeal to me the most.

I consider this one of the most valuable skills that all writers should develop as it ensures production of good quality which is free of clutter and unnecessary words.
My writing skills have significantly improved from one essay to the next. As a writer, I noted that reviewing my essays before submission allowed me to make adjustments and correction in areas that might have slipped my notice while writing. It also allowed me to review the significance of my essay to the subject matter and how my content related to the topic of my essay.
There are areas that I still need to work on in order to perfect my writing skills such as my analytical skills and my creativity skills. While writing an essay on the Igbo African community by Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, I was able to conceptualize the use of creativity in writing and how the use of imagery and other literary devices can enhance the quality of my essay. Although reading is not my cup of tea, through Chinua Achebe’s book, I came to understand how the study of various literature books can help in expounding my creativity skills and analytical skills. A comparison between this narrative essay on African culture and the essay on helping homeless people clearly depicts the improvement in my writing skills.The development of ideas from one paragraph to the next and the transitional connection of ideas throughout the essay is consistent and does not break the line of thought in my writing.
There is a significant improvement from the essay that I wrote on, helping homeless people to the narrative essay on African culture. The development of ideas, the prose, and clarity that is brought out in the narrative essay shows a significant improvement. While comparing the two essay, I also noted that I made fewer grammatical and sentence structure mistakes on the narrative essay as compared to the other essay. Aside from that, I have noted that I am now more able to point out mistakes in my own essays and correct them.
The literature books books that I have read this semester have contributed to my becoming a more critical thinker constantly trying to understand not just the story line in a book or novel but also the themes and issues that have been discussed through the story. This has improved my writing skills, as my essays are more geared towards substantial themes and issues in the society and not just plain essays.
Through the various essays that I have written in this course, I have developed a flexibility in my writing skills. I as am now more able to write different types of essay and utilize the critical thinking skills, I developed in class, in my essays. I was able to utilize my critical thinking skills in my analysis of Chinua Achebe’s novel and the identify the themes that had been brought out in her novel. Though there is still much that I need to learn, as a writer I have managed to accomplish most the learning objectives in this semester’s syllabus.
Perfection in writing cannot be achieved over a fortnight. It requires continuous reading the writing and analyzing the works of other authors in order to develop oneself. This essay has provided a reflection of the improvement in my writing skills and the general growth that can be seen in my essays in terms of creativity, critical thinking and other writing skills that I have developed over the course of the semester. This course has greatly improved my writing skills.