Issues In My Writing

John Edgar Wideman’s “Our Time” a chapter from Brother and Keepers is a very interesting essay explaining the hardships of living in a place like Homeland back in the 50’s. Wideman tells his story through his mother, his brother Robby, and himself bringing up throughout the story the troubles he faces as a writer. Wideman faces the issue of keeping out his own bias as he listens to the stories of his family. Wideman life turned out better than was most likely expected during that time, so it was very hard for Wideman to hear and interpret his family’s stories for truly what they meant. Wideman raises these issues within the

Growing up, writing came as easy to me as riding a bike. It was never anything I needed help on, aside from the occasional proof read - it was something that just came natural. The worst part is, I knew it. Whatever the topic was, I was able to write with ease. Unfortunately, I was not learning more advanced writing techniques and etiquette, just expanding my vocabulary. So when I was assigned to write an argument paper with quotes, cites, and sources, I thought I had it all figured out.

When I stop to think about the memory’s that I have made during my first semester of college; there are both good and bad pieces or times that present themselves. Often with many things there are gray areas, and writing would fall in there for me. I fortunately understand now that I have times where I can over look many of my writing flaws. Such as sentence structure! This by far was my biggest problem in this class, and I fully understand why. Personally I have times that will type up a paragraph and never notice the mistake. That is until someone points it out to me. It’s almost like my brain knows that something is wrong with it, but for some unknown reason it won’t register when I’m revising my paper. So as a writer I have realized that I need to take advantage of people around me and get their feedback on my essay’s; because

Although I can explain this in a very short way, the goal of this assignment is to elaborate on our experiences with writing and reading papers. The first paper I ever wrote was in middle school, and I plagiarized the majority of it, which many people do

In their book They Say I Say, Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst outline strategies writers can use to avoid common mistakes often seen in academic writing. The book thoroughly outlines the different components that make up academic writing, such as initially summarizing what others have said before, responding with original ideas, proving a purpose to the writing, and connecting the writing in a logical and eloquent manner.

Once I get past the first struggle, I am faced with finding words that make my message clear. The last struggle I face is proofreading my paper. Yes, I know I have to proofread to make sure that I understand it, a grammar check, punctuation check, but it’s such a tedious procedure that I don’t always do it. But where there are struggles, there are also strengths. After getting the motivation to begin writing, the content begins to flow and I write whatever comes to mind, it isn’t until I finish once I go back and add those transitions that make it a smooth flow. One of the writing pieces that I am so proud of being my personal statement. It’s ironic because it was the best writing experience I have had in my academic career But it was during a time in which I struggled with anxiety and stress. It was during my senior year of high school and it was just stressful to think about the future and how one piece of paper could make or break it. It was because I knew the impact of my personal statement would have on admission officers that I started the rough drafts months in advance and created what seemed to be fifty rough

One of the things I feel very strongly about is writing. I like how you can say whatever you want knowing that it is your opinion. You have freedom over what you say. Some things that are written could be seen as controversial, but in the scheme of things, most of what is said is okay because at the end of the day you have the right to freedom of speech. Personally writing is an escape from life, whether it is full of pain, sadness, chaos, or just plain boredom. A few years ago my imagination was bright. It held quite a bit of good ideas, but somewhere along the way to now I lost most of that ability to think of the most random plot lines or ideas to write about. My creativity slowly burned out, kind of like a candle. Then one morning not too

One of my strong points in writing is coming up with ideas and knowing how to get started on a paper. I guess you can say I am a free writer. Whatever in my head ends up on paper and I could write about a lot of things that matters to me or upsets me and feel passion when writing it down, but there also a weakness that I can’t overcome because my inner critic come along with it. Which makes me completely change and overshadow my own writing. I have a problem with revising and not being able to see the flaws in my writing, but that’s not it. I overpower one topic with another one in other words I would mash up two topics that is the exact opposite of each other which contradict my whole paper. The other problem is shorting up a sentence as well

A good writer is someone who knows how to write well, have ideas to put on paper and write a well-organized essay that answers the question that a professor gives to you. I identify my own writing by not being good because I have issues sometimes getting words on paper, organizing the essay and my grammar is not very well. The methods that are effective for improving my own writing is practice writing and have someone proof read my work. I am in COM100L because my grammar is not good and my writing on paper is all over the place. My expectation for this course is to improve my grammar when I write essays and fix my mistakes when I write.

Throughout the year, my scores in writing have gone up and down but has shown a general increase. My current writing average is higher than my writing average at the beginning of the year which shows my improvement. My biggest problems in my writing have been MLA formatting, grammar mistakes, and commentary. At first, I made MLA formatting mistakes constantly with my margins, contractions, spacing, and headers. My first few writing assignments were filled with MLA formatting errors but over time, as I lost points from MLA formatting errors, I learned to avoid them. Now, I do not get marked off for MLA formatting at all. My grammar mistakes have always existed in my writing assignments but I’ve seen a slight, steady decrease in the number of

While I’m very good at organizing my paper, I do have a hard organizing my ideas occasionally. By that I mean that sometimes I simply don’t know what I want to say, or how to say it. Once I start getting an idea of how I want to write a paper, it starts working itself out, but sometimes it can be easier said than done, depending on the topic. I am also absolutely atrocious with punctuation. I generally know when it’s time to put a period at the end of the sentence, but my main problem is mostly commas. My other major problems are when to use colons, semicolons, hyphens, or when to start the next paragraph. Lastly, I’m not very good at forming sentences. This mostly linked to punctuation again, and not about word choice. However, I find I’m always questioning whether I have a run-on sentence, fragment sentence, or if I’m doing something else

I feel the most confident when I revise my writing as I go along with the process; in some ways I feel it helps me organize and put all of my thoughts together. I do agree that the multiple writing drafts are very beneficial however, I think I would do better if I could revise my writing as I work on it and only have one continuous draft.

When I was a small child, I didn't like writing unless I was writing something I wanted to. As a result, most of my school work was done half-heartedly, because they were all research projects that we had to do. I didn't have any issues with my writing, and my handwriting was pretty good at my age. My favorite books were the Harry Potter series. I thought I was pretty cool to be able to read such a long book, so I bragged some to my friends. The only topic I liked to write about was fantasy. In second grade, my mom made me start writing every day in a wide ruled journal, so I wrote a story about the Legend of Zelda, a video game I liked. I wrote about it every day for a long time, maybe a year, until I kinda gave up, and wrote the last page

Writing is a skill that takes time to develop. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is very important. Being aware of your strengths can help you stand out, and your weaknesses show you areas where improvement is needed. Like everybody I have weaknesses as well as strengths, and being conscious of them helped me improve my writing skills.

But along the way I slowly started to except it because it really helped keep my thoughts and paragraphs organized. My biggest struggle with the writing process would be writing an annotated bibliography because I’ve never heard or written one for any of my research papers before so it was a brand new experience for me. As a result, of this being my second time writing an annotated bibliography I still struggle a bit but I slowly see myself progressing as I look over the critics I’ve been given in the