My Greatest Strengths As A Writer

I have some strengths and weaknesses as a writer that I am aware of, but honestly it is not an easy task for me. My only strength in writing is my thought process, not the actual writing itself. I have never considered myself to be good in the subject of writing, but I always try my best.

Over this quarter of English, I have learned many things out of the three to four essays that we have written. I have learned how to write college papers in the appropriate page requirements. Our teacher noticed after the first two essays we wrote that we suffered from sentence fragments, sentence run ons, and comma splices. I have learned how to fix those errors in my papers that I write. A thing I have learned about myself as a writer is that I write very well when a paper is about my personal life because it is easier to write about yourself than about a topic that you are just researching for the first time. If the paper is about my life experiences, I would get a good grade on it.

The weakest portion of my writing is my lack of good proofreading. All papers require a significant amount of proofreading not only for grammatical errors, but also for structural problems. Proofreading my own work is difficult. Many times, I wrongly assume that the reader is able to understand my thoughts, while the various points of my argument are actually not expressed clearly. In some instances, I fail to catch obvious errors, such as sentence fragments or contractions, which I should be able to eliminate easily from my writing. Proofreading my own work has consistently been the most difficult part of my writing process, and I continue to struggle with catching all of the errors in my papers.

Once again, I had made mistakes I hadn’t even noticed before. When my paper went through peer review, and I received feedback, I was told something I had thought I had already done. I was told, “Commas need added in a few spots like after 'In fact, and Still,” (Anonymous). Surely when I went back to the essay there were not commas in some important spots, for example, “In fact about a third of students who take out student loans never even graduate and receive their diploma” (Straley 3). Having a peer read your essay, can really help you find your grammatical errors. When we read our own paper, we often read it as if the punctuation is there, even if it is not. When someone else reads it though, they can easily identify these mistakes, especially when it is their first time reading your

The ACT was one of the many steps I have had to take in preparing myself for college. In October I will be taking the test again and I desire to receive a score of 29 or higher. My scores were as follows: English 28, Mathematics 24, Reading 27 and Science 24. I strongly believe my reasoning for receiving such low scores was due to my lack of studying. I did not properly prepare myself for such an important test. There are multiple resources I could have used yet I wasted my time and did not take it seriously. Before retaking the test I aspire to grow in my writing by building up my strengths and knocking down my weaknesses.

Most of the time when someone is told to write a paper, they read the directions and follow the prompt. But when told to think about strengths and weaknesses of how they actually write those papers, it is a good eye opener to realize what needs to be improved and what is already superior quality. For my writing, being a perfectionist is in many ways a strength, but it can also be a weakness. My perfectionism affects all of my other strengths and weaknesses in my writing.

I may not be the best writer there is out there but I do put all of me into each piece I develop. I believe in giving it your all at all times. If your giving it anything less why try at all. I'm huge on that theory and I believe it means a lot more than I believe it to be. I hope that each piece I submit this semester is nothing less than my best and I hope to take in all the criticism and use it to my advantage.

I would typically ask my mother to read my draft because she would give honest feed back. She would catch all the grammar errors that I over looked and point out the sentences that were poorly worded. When we did peer editing in class, I felt as if my classmates would not want to hurt one another’s feelings, so the paper was not thoroughly edited. I took my mother’s constructive criticism and used it to my advantage. I became a strong writer and knew what to look for when I read over my paper. I normally would try to find issues of usage and sentences that were oddly worded. One grammar mistake that I constantly looked for was the wrong usage of “there” and “their.” After continually looking for this specific mistake in all of my papers, it is no longer a problem because I can easily recognize it. Another big grammar error I would focus on was my usage of commas. I would forget to add the “, and” between independent clauses, or I would add unnecessary commas at the beginning of sentences. Receiving good feedback from my mother and focusing on certain grammar errors has helped me to become a better

This year in Honors Freshman Literature and Composition, I have grown tremendously as a writer. My essays from the beginning of the year to the end have showed that I have greatly progressed in many skills that I have worked on. While I have acquired strengths this year, I also have weaknesses that I hope to improve next year in my writing.

The best way to get better at something is to practice and have peers critique your style and fundamentals. As a student, I have my professor and my fellow peers to proofread and critique my writing. With these corrections I have learned I have many new strengths and weaknesses in my writing since before I started school at COTC. I have also been given many different types of resources to help improve my writing.

My strengths as a reader are the ways how I read the book. As I read through a book, I try to understand the meaning of each line, and search for the words that I do not know; additionally, I try to read and get information about the book from multiple different sources, so I could have a better understanding of the theme of the book.

As an incoming freshmen my strengths as a writer are a wide vocabulary , word usage, and writing argumentative essays. I feel with having strength in those areas allows me to be a successful write, with success comes some weakness. My weaknesses are grammar, punctuation, spelling ,and thesis statements. I have a hard time trying to depict what is the best punctuation when writing. All throughout grade school and high school I've always been an underachiever in spelling. English and writing are my least strongest subjects. I floundered in high school with these subjects. In my personal opinion I don't think my high school prepared us well enough for writing on the college level.  I think that the areas that I struggle are very basic levels of

My middle school writing career, I would say was pretty successful. I’ve written about many things, but my favorites were when I wrote narratives preferably fictional, these are always the best to write about, because it sparks up creativity and it gets the reader really interested into the stories. I like reading these sort of stories and that’s where I get a lot of my ideas from. I think in writing my strengths are creativity, punctuation, and attention to audience. My weaknesses are the process of starting a writing (analysis and argument) because at first I’m always doubting myself about what I wrote, but after I get the hang of it, it becomes easier and I can write it more smoothly.

On a scale to rate my writing ability I would rate myself a five. I believe I have trouble with sentence structure and I often find myself composing run-on sentences. My vocabulary level is adequate compared to others at my level of education. My spelling through, is laughable without an ability to spell grammar without a spell check at my disposal. I have no confidence in my capability to use correct punctuation, commas are a big problem for me as well as semicolons. I do not think I would rate my writing ability below a five because social media has enabled me to see other people’s writing ability.

My Biggest writing strength is most likely my sentence and paragraphing structure. Sentence and paragraph structure is the way sentences or paragraphs are formed within a write up in this case a portfolio. Do those sentences contain a capital letter at the beginning, do they end at a complete stop with the proper punctuation. Sentences should contain a subject and a verb and give as much detail in as little words as possible. Do those paragraphs contain mostly five sentences, with one opening sentence, three support sentences, and one closing sentence?