Good evening everyone! My name is Valencia Hopkins. I am a senior. I am 39 years of age. My major is Office Administration. I am employed here with The University of Southern Mississippi. I work in the Registrar’s office as registration specialist. I have been dodging this class for a long time. I like English, but I think English does not like me (smile). My experiences in writing have been minimal until the last two years in college; before than, I have only learned the basics of writing, like putting together sentences and forming paragraphs. In the last two years of school writing has been complicated experience for me. I lose train of thoughts sometimes I feel like my brain is in overload. Every semester for the last two years I have had at least two or more class where I had to write an essay/paper.

There was one experience where I had to write a 25 page paper and in same semester in another class I had a 10 page paper due. This past semester I had to write a public speech about my future career. In this particular writing you we had to do an outline of the speech we where to present and writing the part of the paper wasn’t so bad. Giving the speech about the paper was complicated. Writing an outline helped a lot in organizing my paper and my thoughts. It also helps in choosing and categorizing different topics in the paper and having sub topics to support the main topic. This process seems to help in having a well organize paper.

Two of the main reasons why it’s difficult for me to write a paper is I always begin to write like I talk and it can be informal sometimes and second, I feel like a scatterbrain. Whenever I start to write a story on one experience, other thoughts about another thing may be trying to flood my brain and then I lose thought about the other one I wanted. Over the years I can tell my writing has improved a lot. In the future, I hope to be able to improve tremendously at writing essays, paragraphs, research papers, documents, and stories.