I Am An Efficient Editor

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Poetry has always intrigued me due to its musical nature. I appreciate the pairing of figurative language and ambiguity to express emotions and personal experiences in a distinct, original way. Over the past few years, I have written a lot of poems and lyrics as a means of sorting my thoughts and dealing with overwhelming emotions. Entering the course, I knew my struggles would not lie in writing poetry, but rather, through deciphering the meanings behind others’ poems. I questioned my ability to annotate poems and write about them in an academic format. In my self-assessment, I identified my greatest writing weakness as “my inability to be concise” because "I think of numerous ways to express [an idea or thought] and have trouble…show more content…
Looking over my writing preps from the semester, I am able to see how much I have grown in my ability to analyze prose and poetry. In writing prep #1, we were asked to perform a rhetorical analysis of Billy Collins’ “Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader”. Even though I was often asked to perform “close readings” in high school, through making observations about an author’s writing and identifying how the text interacts with the audience, I came into WR 100 still intimidated by the process of criticizing another author’s work. In writing prep #1, I opened my analysis saying, “Billy Collins is the best-selling poet since Robert E Frost, giving his writing substantial credibility,” which now, seems like impertinent information to the overall purpose of a rhetorical analysis (citation). I also stated, “Collins’ piece on poetry and its significant influence on the human mind does a superb job of describing the pleasures that accompany it and why humans have been drawn to it for so long” (citation). Although I do say that Collins’ piece successfully achieves what he set out to accomplish, I do not explore or explain the rhetoric behind his success. Primarily, I focused on what the over-arching message of the text was, rather than making specific observations about what was being said and why. Compared to my more recent writing preps, and even to writing prep #2, there was great improvement in the thoroughness and depth
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