My Strengths And Weaknesses Of My Writing

The art of writing is a complex and difficult process. Proper writing requires careful planning, revision, and proofreading. Throughout the past semester, the quality of my writing has evolved significantly. At first, I struggled with the separation of different types of paragraphs, and I found writing them laborious. Constant practice, however, has eliminated many of my original difficulties, and helped to inspire confidence in my skills. As a collegiate writer, my strength lies in my clear understanding of the fundamentals of writing, while my primary weakness is proofreading my own work.

Throughout the course of this semester in AP Lang, my eyes have been opened to many of the weaknesses I never knew I had in writing. Coming into this semester, I had heard about the difficulty of this class, but was not unduly worried about not receiving an A; I have always considered myself as a competent if not strong writer. However, after failing to attain desired grades on several important essays, I was devastated, and realized that although I had mastered the basics of grammar and writing, there was still much for me to work on. Also, I did not understand that much of my grade in AP Lang would be determined by speaking in front of others, which is not my strong suit. What I have come to find is that writing essays containing all of the new information we have learned throughout the semester, such as requirements for different types of essays and good writing strategies, takes a lot of work, time, and thinking. Unfortunately, my procrastination caused me to only get done what had to be done instead of putting in the extra work and truly understanding everything.

Many students question themselves of what they might learn from taking an English class. If they will understand the material or if what they learn in class will be used later in their lives. Gaining something out of a class is what matters the most or why else would a student take that class in the first place. Through my observations and experiences if someone were to ask me what I learned in English 101, I would say that I have improved as a student overall. Taking English 101 has helped me to become a more specialized writer, a more studious student, and a person who is more minded person.

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.

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.

English 101 was most certainly a learning experience for me. Of course, everyone says that about their English 101 course in college, but I’m being as honest as humanly possible— if it is, in fact, humanly possible (joke). In all sincerity, I was expecting my English 101 Professor, Dr. Bailey, to find a string of incoherencies in my writing and lack of structure, for I believed my writing was replete with; to the contrary, Dr.Bailey found an unexpected set of errors, and helped me realize why these particular errors were even occurring.

I have created multiple PowerPoint presentations before. The most recent one was for Learning and Serving last semester. Creating PowerPoint is one of my favorite ways to do for any presentation that I give. I find it easy to use, and a good aid when giving a speech.

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.

Although I started the semester off not knowing how to write a strong well-written essay, English 101 has expanded my visions on writing. It's helped me grow as a student and what I have learned from it will help me in the future. We wrote many different types of essays with different types of writing styles, which helped me find my strengths and weaknesses. I gain strength in my weaknesses and improved my strengths.

The last piece of paper I will refer to was the comparison paper. In the comparison paper I felt I also learned about two influential women from two very different periods and also enjoyed connecting and comparing the two. Through these pieces of work I feel I've improved my grammar and spelling and also have learned how to write in English a paper that requires investigation and expressing thoughts, something that I've never done before. Before this semester the last time I wrote in English was 9 years ago and even then I don’t remember myself ever writing an essay, mostly un-seens and book reports. I feel that next semester in need to continue to improve my writing skills. I feel that my oral skills are relatively good, but my writing skills need to improve. I feel that I am not able to really express myself in English through writing. I feel that my vocabulary and grammar are not fluent enough. I enjoy writing about topics that have to do with current events and politics. I enjoy expressing my thoughts and comparing different situations and using creativity to connect

In English 101 there are several aspects of writing that I did not get to explore in high school. In this class we were given freedom to write our stories without harsh guidelines that twisted our creativity. I have learned how to absorb information and transfer it to paper in a style to keep readers engaged. I am able to reflect on my writing process and critique my problems. This class has given me skills that I can put into practice in the future.

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.

I am a science major and I have always minimized English Language courses because I thought I was already very good at writing. I did not think I would ever really need to use what I would acquire from such a course. When I came to Montgomery College and I was going to take the course English 101, my expectations were that I would have no difficulty scoring good grades in the course and I would learn nothing really helpful from it. This is because in high school, I put very little effort into my English class, but I had impressive scores in writing. I began to understand that I am not as good as I thought I was at writing when I started taking english courses in college. During my previous English course, English 102, I was able to improve certain aspects of my writing which I am glad for. For instance I am confident that my essay structures are well built. But some things in writing remained a challenge for me. I am glad that I am taking an English course that would permit me to work on things I thought I was already good at like awareness in writing essays and proper use of grammar and punctuation

Throughout my journey through English 111, I have learned a lot through all my papers and my writing has opened up within a way I never thought it would. I have many strengths in my papers, but also still have many weakness that I must improve on to be the writer I want to be at the end of this journey. Many pieces I have written this semester, many great ideas put into words that have simply flows onto the keyboard. At the end of the day every paper has it weakness.