Reflection Essay #1 + Editing Skills Checklist
Reflection Essay #1
Reflecting on the first half of my spring semester, I feel that I have grown significantly as a writer. Starting off, I was far from the best writer, and I am still working on becoming the best writer I can be now. However, by applying constructive criticism from my both peers and professor, considering the revision comments from the university tutors and professor, paying close attention to class instruction and regularly reading my textbook, I have greatly improved my writing and overall language skills.
Looking back at the journals that I had submitted early on in the semester, I am honestly embarrassed at the lack of effort I put into my writing. I felt that my written language skills had a certain limitation and that the work that I continued to produced would never advance, and I was perfectly fine with that. Transitioning to college, though, has shown me how important language skills are because they are used in literally everything I do.
After reevaluating my first few journals, I became aware of how unnatural and robotic the overall tone of my writing was. It seems as if my goal was to be personable and relatable but I did not know how to convey that in a natural tone. For example, in my first journal, I discussed the challenges associated with college expenses, using myself as a reference. Despite the fact that what I wrote was true and based solely on my experience, my delivery was extremely mechanical and my words lacked emotion. After reading chapter four of my assigned textbook (‘The Transition to College Writing’; “How Good Writing Gets Written”), I realized why it was so challenging for me to compose naturally flowing pieces. The book helped me to understand that most students write “mechanical” papers when they do not fully understand the task at hand or their purpose for writing. Although journals are meant to be expressive and unconditional, I noticed that my essays were formatted in the same way. I came to the understanding that when writing lacks purpose or has no intent, it is disorganized, without clear transitions, and overly “patched together”. The solution that I have found to help me the most with this problem is to create an outline, one that clearly organizes my paper by each section. Having an outline helps me to determine my purpose for writing (or thesis), main ideas, and transition to each new thought throughout my paper.
Although I feel that I have improved very much as both a writer and a student, there are still a few things that I need to work on. For instance, it is sometimes challenging for me to maintain one point of view throughout my work. Both my professor and writing center tutors have brought it to my attention on multiple occasions but I can never seem to remember to keep a consistent narrative. I think this problem stems from me not knowing where to place certain verbs or how to use certain verb tenses. In order to overcome these problems, I know that I need to give greater focus to grammar rules and sentence structures.
I also feel that I need to work on learning how to form a good conclusion and proper transitioning. My main difficulty with transitioning is being too repetitive with the phrases I use or just not doing so at all. Not knowing how to properly transition from each paragraph or new idea makes it hard to gather all of my main ideas and create a good conclusion paragraph. I know how to restate my thesis but once I do that I just get stuck and don’t know how to move onto what I need to communicate next.
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