Improving My Essay Writing

Like transforming from a caterpillar to a butterfly, my writing style transformed from something mediocre to something quite exceptional. In high school, even when I took advanced placement English and Literature courses, I was never good at writing. My writing would lack structure, reasoning, syntax, and a well-defined thesis statement. My inadequate grades on writing assignments lowered my self-esteem, so I assumed I would never enjoy writing papers because I believed I could never improve. However, since attending a university my writing style has improved far beyond my expectation. My EN 101 course enhanced my understanding of the different ways I could approach my writing. Also, it enhanced my comprehension of outlines to complete assignments. Investing quality time into my writing made a substantial difference because I became a stronger writer. Through the late nights, constant revisions, and agonizing head traumas, I learned that my writing is truly spectacular whenever I incorporate well-defined thesis statements, provide sufficient supporting evidence, and maintain a clear focus in my assignments.

I was pushed constantly to work harder at my writing. I studied and practiced several new techniques and methods for prewriting and organizing the essays I found so hard to create. At first, I had quite a few bad days and quite a few subpar essays. My grades would vary greatly from paper to paper. This really scared me, as I hoped to keep myself from drastically dropping in my grades. Yet, I wanted to maintain my grade point average so I had no choice but to succeed and impress around every corner. I began to pour in, even more, work and apply all of the newly learned skills from that class into my mind. I hoped that soon I would be able to find a system for writing that helped me form proper

In my first “Who I am as a Writer” paper I stated how one of the areas that I needed to improve was writing. I went into more depth talking about how my writing is not descriptive enough and how I cannot grab the reader's attention. Even though I still need to continue making improvements, I have gotten better in both of these aspects. Compared to my papers in high school my introduction paragraphs have improved.

Writing an essay may seem like a huge obstacle to overcome, but with a plan of attack and a little organization, it can be easily completed. All it takes is seven easy steps.

I think self-reflection, or a careful cogitation of one’s personal work, is very important. It will help me think about my strengths and weaknesses in my writing skills and learning process, so that I can improve my weaknesses in the future and become a better writer. I believe, I have many strengths and many weaknesses that can be seen transparently through my drafts, revisions, and final essays, or writings, this semester. My overall strength includes the ability to pick out good examples from articles and the ability to construct good development of my body paragraphs after my revisions. On the other hand, my overall weakness includes having some unclear explanation of thoughts, unclear topic sentences, confusing thesis statements, having undefined terms, difficulties transitioning from one idea to another. I have learned that to have a good essay, I must revise my papers more than once because there are always flaws that can be fixed or improved. My writing process has evolved from having difficulties writing down or explaining my thought process to being able to explain and clarify examples to help support my thesis statement.

My entire life, reading and writing have always been my weaknesses. Coming from a Hispanic household, the way things are said and written does not usually translate the same way to English. As much as I have always tried to push myself and keep improving, I feel like I have reached a point where I need a small push and guidance to take my writing to the next level. From my high school, I learned a lot of writing technics and have some small grammar lectures every now and then. Writing my research papers, preparing speeches, and all the college essays have given me lots of practice with different writing styles and methods. Yet, I still have not found one that I feel the most confident in. This semester, I truly wish to improve the transitions

Writing can be a difficult craft to understand and even begin to master, so it was refreshing to have this fact adressed within the first few pages of On Writing Well. Zinsser's reassuring voice telling me that when given the right tools and knowledge, anyone can write, instantly made me know I was going to like learning from him. I had never before heard an author, or writer of any nature for that matter, tell me such a thing. This sense of understanding would continue on as I read, for this would be only the first of many useful tips I would be given while reading this book.

Over the eighth grade year, I have learned to effectively use feedback and reflection skills to strengthen my writing. These writing processes taught me to include peer and teacher feedback along with self-reflection to earn a better grade on my writing pieces. In the beginning of the year, I would simply complete the drafts my teacher assigned. Proof of my original writing process is shown in the essay, titled One Necessity of a Hero: Personal Sacrifice, in which it reflects on the Thematic Unit. To demonstrate my poor writing process, a segment of my original introduction stated, “After analyzing documents from The Hobbit Thematic Unit, I discovered that the principles of heroism involve personal sacrifice. I also learned that a hero is

Over the course of my studies at university, I have grown and learned more about academic writing and numerous writing styles. I believe there is so much room for me to master my writing skills to succeed and complete my degree and improve my academic writing and personal skills through more practice. However, I have become concerned with my first attempt submitting my piece of paper through the online test in the Writers’ Diet diagnostic tool and was labelled ‘flabby’ in my writing. Analysing my errors and referring to the textbook ’Communication Toolkit’ by Grellier and Goerke (2014), also submitting my piece of writing to Grammarly and paper rater I was able to measure my weakness in the area of sentence structure, punctuation and grammar.

My experience of making mistake is I feel too confident and talented in the ESL 263 class. I think this class is easy, so I don’t care much about this class. I remember when I have the first writing assignment, I think it's easy, so I don't practice. I write it only in 3 hours. Then, I turn in the assignment the next day. I believe that I do good enough to get a B in this writing. But I am wrong. When Mr. Lee, my teacher, finishes grading it, he says that a lot of students get the bad grade. I think I will never make mistakes, but it's not right. I have an F for the first writing assignment. I don’t know why. But when I read Mr. Lee comments, I figure out that I misuse of grammar, misuse of the comma. And it happens because I’m too confident.

While writing this three essays I analyzed and I tried to critically think about what I was writing. I always asked myself if my opinions and convictions were affecting the information I was transmitting to my readers. To write the first essay I tried to find the articles with the most current information but that they would differ between them in order for me to recognize which was the strongest and more persuasive article. Also, the first draft of my essay number one wasn't specific enough and it need it some clarification in the transitions from one idea to the other. Also, my first draft had several grammar mistakes and need it to be more coherent. Then, in the second draft I tried to fix the grammar mistakes and I used better transition words such as, furthermore and additionally, so the reader could better understand what I was trying to expressed. Next, my last draft for essay one was a lot clearer and more specific and concise then the first one. The first draft of my second essay was better than that of my first essay but it still grammar mistakes were plentiful; so I tried fixing those on my second draft as well as I improved some sentences so they could be more coherent and clearer. The first draft of my third essay had several grammar mistakes which I tried to fix in the second draft as well as improve some of the sentences so they could be more concise and easier to understand. Overall, my

When I first started the class I was struggling a lot. Since English is my second language, I had many stressful moments that made me think about dropping my classes. But when I thought about my future, I just kept studying even harder, waiting for my performance to improve. As a result, I felt like every time I wrote an essay, it got easier, which tells me that I’m on the right path. In addition, this class has helped me improve my grammar, taught me an important life lesson about sticking on my goal and helped me to enhance my computer skills

My writing skills are decent, if I take the time to fully process my thoughts. When it is a timed assignment or test, my skills go right out the window, I concentrate more on answering the prompt rather than the grammar, punctuation, or structure. It’s like a jumbled mess of writing filled with lots of errors. When I’m writing my main goals are to answer the prompt, have good structure, and no grammatical or punctuation errors. These goals sometimes get in the way of me expressing myself freely; if a sentence doesn’t flow right with rest of the paragraph, I will re-examine my paragraph or paper to see if I can conjure up a sentence to finish out my paragraph before moving on to the next paragraph. Another example is if I feel like I don’t

One of the high points of the class was consistently making high A’s. We wrote a variety of different types of papers, and my grade was always respectable. Succeeding in this class made me feel adequately prepared to write proper papers. Although I made impressive grades for the class, I was able to do so with only minimal effort. Therefore, I knew I could execute my papers better. The quality of my writing seemed to stay stagnant over the course of the year. This class would have been exponentially more beneficial had it challenged me to improve my writing, however it never did.

To become a success in life, we all need to learn to become a good student in every aspect of life. Becoming a good student takes much work and self-discipline. There are many ways that a student can stand out from the rest of the class. These good students are distinguished by their attitude, intellectual skills, consciousness, and achievement.