Sweat and Tears Paid Off

            Having an English class in school can be really helpful in our lives. Being a student who just came from high school, the writing concept is different from college. In the start of the term, there were a number of misconceptions on how students write an essay. In my personal experience, the misapprehensions on how I write an essay is whether to use first, second or third person perspective. The professor clearly explained to the students that the third person perspective is always the best one to use in writing essays that are required for school. Another problem in writing an essay is how to cite a source properly. The professor clearly explained to the students how to use the APA style in citing. She even showed the students a link on the Internet on how to cite sources when there is more than one author or no author at all. The last misunderstanding is how to make a strong and bold thesis statement that can attract the attention of the audience to read our essay. To be honest, I never really knew how to make a thesis statement until the professor taught us. During our extended definition essay, she stated that it is better to have two sentences for the thesis statement rather than one. The first sentence containing what I understand about the word and the second sentence containing what the three main points are about the word. To sum it all up, all the other misconceptions in class were all clarified by the professor.

            From June to December 2012, we wrote two essays in class: extended definition and argumentative essay. Both essays were very challenging to me in a way that it had so much drafting before I finally reached my final paper. I had to go back to the professor and ask her five times just to get my thesis statement approved. The agony did not stop there, I had to be patient in dealing with getting the right words that could attract the audience for my introduction. I had to get the right attention getter that would make them read my whole essay and would not get bored. After the introduction, we had to pass our first draft to the professor and the grade I got was low that I had to stay up late the next night just to get the right words that could get me a high grade. Even though I had all these challenges, I managed to stay patient with myself and with the paper itself.

            I remember the first day of school where the professor immediately asked us to write an essay about a certain issue in the country. I decided to write about Over Population. After writing the extended definition and argumentative essay, we then had to write this so called “exit essay” which was also about Over Population. After three months of writing essays over and over again, going through revisions and going through all my mistakes, comparing my entry and exit essay, I can say that I have improved in writing not only in the format but also grammatically. I knew when to use the third person perspective, I knew what the right transitional devices and reporting verbs to use.

             We all have our goals and objectives before we start on a certain project. My objective in this class was to get the chance to actually finish a paper with a good grade and teach myself a lesson to be patient with certain things. I can say that I have actually achieved my goal. I taught myself a lesson that I should not procrastinate, should not get frustrated with myself and the professor because these could bring me to my downfall. Though I did not get the grade for my final paper, I think I did my best and hope that all the sweat and tears paid off.