Baxter 1

Thomas Baxter
English 103-014
Mrs. Rayne
3 September 2014
RWL 1
I grew up in the Towson area and attended Loch Raven High School. I graduated in 2013,
and am currently in my second year at Salisbury University. I took honors English courses for
the majority of high school, but opted to take the AP course my senior year. While I attended
Loch Raven, I completed four different research projects for each year that I took an English
course. My final two years were definitely the heaviest in terms of workload and complexity. My
junior year was mostly focused on grammar, sentence structure, and syntax. While my teacher at
the time, Mrs. Jennings, was often vilified among my friends and me for assigning too much
work every night, I believe that her class was one of the more important that I took in high
school. I truly developed more skills in writing as a result of her heavy workload. My senior year
was devoted heavily to reading comprehension of classic texts, constructing a well-written thesis,
and properly developing supporting paragraphs based on said thesis.
There were many essays that I had to write that were not in my English classes. My AP
Human Geography class had many papers that I had to write. However, these assignments
differed from those that I was given in my English classes in that they focused much more on
content rather than writing style. Very few teachers who issued essays in non-English courses
gave much attention to grammar and syntax unless the paper was blatantly poorly written. While
this may seem like a bad thing at first, I believe there is a time to focus on syntax, a time to focus

Baxter 2

on content, and a time where focusing on both. This makes one realize that there are several
different angles on becoming a good writer. Classes that issue different perspectives on writing
teach you new ways to write essays that you would not have realized from taking solely English
classes.
My opinion of my own writing style is that when I am left to develop my own opinions
or base an opinion off of facts is when I am at my best. Reading comprehension is probably
when I am at my worst, but by no means am I a poor writer when left to do so. For instance,
when I took my AP exams following my senior year, I passed every single on excluding my
English exam. I attribute this to two different things. One is that I studied much harder on the
other tests than I did on the English one. The other reason is because all of my other exams had
essay questions that had nothing to do with reading comprehension. There were straightforward
questions about a certain graph/concept/idea that I had to explain and that was all that I was
required to do. With English I was left to develop an idea based on a short story or news
passage, which is not my strength.
While I have not taken a formal English class in the past year, this does not mean that I
have not been completing essays since then. In my first semester here at Salisbury University, I
took History 101, which had four required essays, three of them from books. In my second
semester I took Communications 100, which had several essays and speeches that I had to
complete. I received good grades on most of the writing assignments that I was assigned last
year, however I know that this class will be more critical of what I write because I have not
participated in a class that is exclusively devoted to writing style at the college level.

Baxter 3

The last actual English assignment that I had to take was my AP English exam. I
received a two on the assignment, which did not get me any credit for college. From this I hope
to improve upon my last performance, which ultimately resulted in failure.