Writing DEVELOPMENT (510)
When coming to college, I did not know what to expect. I did not know if I was even ready for that huge transition from my high school to a state university. I really thought that my writing skills were pretty adequate for an incoming freshman. Long behold, everything that I learned in high school changed immensely when coming to college, especially in writing papers. I feel that my writing has developed a lot from the beginning of the semester to now. I feel my strengths in writing papers are writing a well formed thesis and adding supporting details that support my claim made. As a writer, my weaknesses are that I tend to not double check my work. This creates a lot of grammatical errors within my paper. I have been improving this throughout the year by making sure to go over everything that I have written and change anything that does not make sense. I also have my peers review my papers that I write just to make sure that I have not missed any errors that I have made. This may be very time consuming but it is worth it when I want to write a profound paper. When comparing my family narrative (what we wrote at the beginning year) to my argument paper (what we wrote at the end of the year), a lot of good changes has been made in my writing skills. In my family narrative paper, I saw a lot of grammatical errors and run on sentences. This shows that I did not go over my paper multiple times and was just being a lazy writer. I also saw in my family narrative, that I jumped around a lot within the paper. This made it very confusing for the reader to comprehend my story. When I looked at my argument paper, I noticed that there were very few errors made which shows that my writing has improved a lot throughout the year. I felt that my argument paper had well supportive evidence for my claim made. Also, I felt that it flowed very well together and my point was very clear. One of the things that I changed throughout the year was making sure to start the assignment right after it was assigned. At the beginning of first semester, I saw that I procrastinated a lot with all my assignments which reflected poorly on my grades. This semester I felt that I put more time towards all my writing assignments and started them right after they were assigned. I did not take peer review and instructor feedback very seriously first semester. When second semester rolled around, I took both of those accounts and opinions into huge consideration. I learned throughout the year that feedback is one of the most important things in writing papers. My writing has improved a lot throughout the year with the help of my professor, my T.A., and my peers. They all helped me immensely in becoming a better writer as a whole.