Reflection Journal

Over the course of the entire semester, there have been many challenges I have faced as a writer. Coming into the class, I was a little worried. Not having taken a writing class in the past 4 years, and jumping into a new class online, was quite intimidating for me. I was worried I would have forgotten the basic steps to writing a good paper, in order to get a decent grade in the class. I was also worried that I wouldn’t be able to understand subject matter in the online setting. I’m more of an in class, hands on, not online and instructing yourself through the majority of the assignment type of person. But, there was something that initially helped starting with the first assignment. And that would be the information read in chapters 2 and 5 of The Elements of Style by William Strunk.

I have always struggled as a writer. I find some of the styles of writing harder to portray and put into words than others. One of the things that I read in the first assignment that really helped me would be the lesson of not joining independent clauses by a comma, and closely related, do no break sentences with a comma into two separate sentences. I used to believe the more sentences I had in a paper, with varying lengths, the better it was. In order to accomplish that in the past, I would either add a period in place of a comma, or add a comma in place of a period. That way I would be able to vary sentence length with the ease of just switching the comma and period around. According to the book The elements of Style, the use of that technique is something to avoid. “If two or more clauses grammatically complete and not joined by a conjunction, are to form a single compound sentence the proper mark of punctuation is a semicolon. It is of course equally correct to write by replacing the semicolons by periods.” “We hopped into the Denali and took off down the dirt road, just like we normally would any other day.” Normally in the previous sentence, I would have broken it apart into...