Bass 1

Lauren Bass
Professor Collins
ENGL 1302
10 may 2016
Learning Through Mistakes
When I decided to take English 1302 in the end of last school year, I thought that
I had the skill of writing under my belt completely, but I didnt realize that there were
many things for me to learn. As I struggled through two semesters of college English
classes, I realized that I had a lot of work to do. Throughout this spring semester, I have
utilized new ways to refine my skills in writing and editing such as modifying my
sentence structure and word choice, and correcting grammatical errors that are less
common.
In Essay Two, when the rough draft was due in class, Mrs. Collins instructed the
students to take out several different colored highlighters and highlight each starting word
of the paragraph, every other sentence in the respective color, and also to mark the use of
the be verb. The purpose of this exercise was to give the class a physical image of what
the essay needed work on and it centered around structure. When I was done highlighting
and marking, I realized that the beginnings of my body paragraphs were not so original
and ended up repeating themselves. I also learned that I needed to vary my sentence
length because my paper was becoming predictable and boring due to the fact that the
sentences were all the same length. After correcting all the structural errors in essay two,
I was left with a well-rounded, more sophisticated paper that I was confident to turn in.

Bass 2
In Essay One, I made many grammatical mistakes that I was not even aware of. I
barely passed the paper because of the continuous errors that lowered the value of my
essay. Of the many errors that I made, the one that I was most unaware of was the rule of
ellipsis in a quote. In Essay One, I wrote on Hillary Clintons Speech Womens rights
are Human rights and was required to include multiple quotes from the speech itself in
order to prove my point. Instead of using the entire sentence from her speech, I would cut
it and simply insert it into the quotation marks. When I received my final grade for essay
Two, I realized that a set of ellipsis was needed if I were to cut a sentence from a speech
and place it in my paper. In the same paper, I also learned to place quotation marks
around titles of speeches such as Hillary Clintons speech Womans Rights are Human
Rights. I constantly had points deducted from my essay because of small errors. If I
learned anything from Essay Two, it would be that small errors add up and can impact
whether the intended audience will continue reading or, in this case, whether my English
teacher will give my essay a passing grade.
With this knowledge that I have learned and applied to my work, I am positive
that my papers and other pieces of writing will benefit from the skills I have learned in
this class. I have learned not only how to correct grammatical errors and vary my
sentence structure, but also that there is always elements that can be improved upon.