Last week, I went to the Penn State writing tutors in order to get my first paper peer-reviewed by a fellow college student. At first, I didn’t think that this would be beneficial for me but I was definitely wrong. I quickly learned that I would be visiting the learning center quite often for them to edit and help me improve my writing.
I brought my English 015 paper on the critical analysis of a cigarette commercial and it’s effectiveness. My paper was edited by my friend Mariah in my class earlier that day so I had already made minor improvements. I felt more confident walking in their knowing that I had fixed the little mistakes that they could help me with my structure and organization of the essay.
In my writing, I am least comfortable with my sentence structure. I often find myself having trouble expressing myself in an unopinionated way. I also have trouble with repetition and word choice in many cases. There are simple solutions to both of those issues so having multiple people read my papers allows for all or most of my mistakes to get caught.
As I went through my session, I was getting coached through the assignment and given tips on ways to improve in the future. I was given helpful at home ideas too that could improve my paper. I read my paper paragraph by paragraph to make sure it flowed nicely. I then checked to make sure the paragraphs had transitions and were in the proper order. I reorganized my essay the night before to make sure my body paragraphs sounded correct in the order they were in.
This was my first college essay and I had to make sure that I turned in work I was proud of. I loved my learning center experience and they are going to see a lot more of me. They did everything I asked them to check and more. In the future, I am going to use their advice before I get there so when I do get there we can focus on other things. The learning center taught me that college essays are much more complex than others. Professors want the most information possible and no fluff. I am so happy that Penn State offers a service to help me that much more!
