Reflective Statement -Dan Primavera

This semester of Comp II has been crazy for my personal growth as a writer. Although I believed myself to be a fairly superior writer coming into this semesters’ class, I was quickly proven wrong after receiving one of Professor Hodges’ in depth criticisms of our writings. Every single criticism of my writing that I received greatly improved my writing every step of the way into each of the next assignments. I have to credit my professor in doing so because of how in depth his reccomendations for each piece of writings were, and how much time he had to have put into aiding each of his students for every assignment.

One of the things that my Comp I (last semester) professor did not do well was make reccomendations to our writing. All she really did was edit our grammar and say things such as, “you should elaborate on this point.” Although that kind of help seemed okay, I now realize how (to be brutally honest) lazy she was after seeing the kind of grading process my current professor does. When I would go through my current professors’ (professor Hodges) reccomendations I could sometimes be overwhelmed with how much things he was able to pick out that I began to think was wrong with my essay. But, then I began to realize that what he was saying wasn’t pointing out the faults of my paper, but rather what I could elaborate on and he actually put in information that I could include rather just doing what my last professor did and just say, “change this.” The reccomendations put forth by Professor Hodges was extraordinarily helpful to my development as a writer because he made me realize just how much I could be doing that would make for an almost perfect essay (if that is possible).

Something else that I really learned how to do better this semester was to cut down on my wordiness and really just get to the point without random and not needed “fluff.” Professor Hodges seemed to be a master of cutting down a paper, which became prevalent to me after our first longer essay because of how he was basically able to make the same arguments I made throughout the paper with about a third of the words, and even with that much less words made the arguments even stronger. Now that the semester is just about over, I can confidently say that I am definitely better at making my arguments more clear and concise although I still have some work to do.

Overall, I have to say that this semester of Comp II with Professor Hodges was by far the best, most fun, most interesting, and most helpful composition course or english course that I have ever taken. I truly appreciate the time and effort that Professor Hodges put into this class and helping each student individually so greatly in their writing, me in particular. I can confidently say that my writing has greatly improved throughout this semester and hopefully I will be able to remember most tips that I have received during this course because I would be a great writer for life then.