End of Semester Comments

It's time for me to review my writing after this semester of uncertainties. Each type of paper gave me mixed results. At first, my formal writing seemed to only struggle with citations. However, after this semester I feel that I've gotten lost as a writer and am struggling to find my own voice. I understand I have a strong voice in my argumentative essay, but when I switch to informal writing afterwards I feel lost. Speaking of informal writing, I seemed to struggle most with my memoir. Finding a topic for any essay was difficult, but the memoir gave me the most trouble. If anything, I want to be a better informal writer, but I'm finding myself feeling more lost than anything.

When it came to creativity, it took quite some time to spark any. The words did not simply flow from my fingers like my first essay. I became very self critical of myself and thoughtful. This hasn't helped my grade much and I'm still striving to find something to inspire me in each paper.

I have to admit; I am a procrastinator. I usually wait till the last week to work on my essays. When in the classroom, I can't write very well so I wait till I get home to work. For the entire week, I would spend hours working on my papers when I arrived at home. However, most of the time, my topics don't come to me until a week before the final draft is due most of the time. Thus, I haven't really worked under anything but pressure. Especially when the back of my mind is nagging me to do well.

My ideas come to me at random. Usually when I think really hard my ideas come to me. I normally spend 5 minutes on each sentence in my essays to determine the structure, the words I will use, etc. I wish it came more natural to me, but I think if I do something like that without heavy consideration, my essay will suffer.

I usually miss plenty of things in my writing. In this case, I usually have 4 classmates edit my paper. On the first papers, my classmates were too nice when it came to editing and left in minute mistakes. Now they have become more critical and have benefited my later writing (descriptive essay). I'm hoping, through my peer editors, I will be able to sniff out mistakes in my writing much easier than before.

Overall, when it comes to growth as a writer I can't say I've gotten worse. However, I can say I've gotten more lost on how I want to present my material. I'm hoping to learn more about my style and use it to make strong papers instead of "ok" ones littered with mistakes. I have gotten B's and A's on my essays but I'm very critical about my B's. My expectations for myself were high when I started this class and I higher on each essay. I say I've gotten better with citations;however, I'm not sure about my growth in the other writing traits. I'm grateful for being introduced to this different types of papers, though and feel it's healthy for me as a writer.