English 2270

 Reflective Writing Assignment

Nowadays some people suggest that there is not enough STEM students graduating from the universities and that the Humanities and Arts degrees are degrees to nowhere. But I think that just like the world needs engineers, we need writers too.   I ask myself: What can I achieve by studying English (creative writing)? Well, I may not be the next Stephen King or J.R.R. Tolkien, but I might be a better human.

What I have learned through the process of editing and revising my work in this class is that every time I read my work I find something different that I didn’t know it was there.  Sometimes it is something meaningful hidden, but most of the time it is just grammatical errors. Since English is not my first language I struggle a lot with spelling.  Sometimes I tend to write things backwards. Going through my work helps me realize those errors.

English is a very difficult language to learn for a non-native speaker, and occasionally words don’t come out as I want them to. In some occasions if I don’t edit my work the whole story can be written in a different way because of my lack of experience writing English. For me, editing and revising is a must. Editing also makes me realize that as a writer I often forget that I am writing for others and that I need to take out pieces that are not important in the story or to add more to it. One of the things that I think was more important to me is voice. I need to add a more extended vocabulary to my stories. I notice that in my writing my voice was so passive. I learned to do it with a more direct voice and focus on the things that give my story a more clear feeling.

It is very difficult for me to give my characters different voices. Sometimes I try to introduce a very uneducated guy to my story and he ends up speaking in the same voice as the lawyer. Sometimes I don’t add any regional dialogue to the characters so they basically all sound the same.

Throughout the process of this class I learned how to incorporate different vocabulary for shades of meaning according to the circumstances. I learned to add synonyms to describe characters because each way describes a different person, a different mood or tone, a different medium, even a different speaker. I tried to imitate one of my favorite authors, because I hear that you learn by observing how others do it. I know that I won’t be like him but at least it could help me to find my own voice.

Character is another area that this class has helped me to improve. We learned that the characters are part of the writer’s voice and that they say what we feel. Even though the character is part of me they have their own characteristics. I learned that by creating a good character I need to pay attention to listening how other people speak and be aware of their speech patterns.

This course thought me to have patience in reading my own work and to fix the things I need to fix. Allowing others to see my work and letting them criticize it has been a challenge but very helpful. I learned to take advantage of the good and bad comments of my team. Also, criticizing the work of others has also improved my writing.

Writing helps me to understand the world better and if the world had only scientists or mathematicians, we would lose life’s humane side. I think that being armed with knowledge on subjects like reading and writing, poetry, or any philosophically-related field of the arts we can be better humans.  Writers are destined to see life in a whole new way; as well as to be more tolerant, reflective, inspired, literate, and more appreciative to the stories of people's lives. It can also help us to have a better perception about others, and that is also a great advantage in life.

Creative writing is a way to ‘Know Thyself’, the great admonition of Socrates. Writing is about your insides’ imagination, discovery, knowledge, power… and that is how it would help my writing. A writer’s job is to remind the world that there is a place in their heads called imagination. Literature can help the doctor, the chemist, the engineer, etc. to be a better person and a creative writer can create literature to enrich the soul.

We use pictures and video to understand an image. With the internet offering a fast way to see or hear something, we forget that we can imagine these things too. The art is there in everything we see and a writer has the job of rearranging them to the way we like it to create art. These images are everywhere the hardest job is not creating them but to remember them. We use poems as special language and it gives life to ideas. The creativity to which a story is written changed the way people talked from practical language to literature language.

I learn to not see things with perception. Even though throughout the course of life perception plays a great deal in knowledge that it becomes automatic. In ordinary speech, we leave phrases unfinished and words half expressed their initial sounds are barely perceived. The same thing happens with the objects, we don’t see them but instead we put them in categories and recognize them by their characteristics. As a result, literary language has changed my way of seeing things, making it in a good way, a more tortuous but more pleasant form of the English language.

One of my best stories