My Writing Challenges

I have been a student at San Jose States University for second years, English 1A was my first regular English class, and over the course of my stay I have grown and learned a lot. As Hospitality major, I do not know whether need my writing skills for future job, but I know the great experience in English 1A class would help me to improve all my writing weakness.

A semester has passed since I started college and my journey of becoming a better writer. It has been a very important semester for my future college career, and I would not be here without the things I have accomplished. The composition program has really helped me to prepare for what college writing is all about. Now standing here and looking back I could not imagine how it would be without that class. I believe my English, and my writing is better than it has ever been, and all thanks to the composition program.

In my second rough draft, “The Benefits of Older Adults Volunteering,” I noticed that I only had eight comma mistakes and my main problem was forgetting to connect a compound sentence with a comma (“The Benefits of Older Adults Volunteering” 1-4). Once again, I read the comments my college teacher wrote, then I proceeded to look for other comma errors in my paper and noticed I was now able to find comma errors I never noticed before when I wrote my first rough draft. I recognized that Mrs. Fleming’s comma power point, worksheet, and my college teacher’s comments were helping me improve. I also started correcting my mistakes without having to check if I was correct or not. However, I still found myself struggling with noticing when a comma was needed in front of certain words such as and.

Steve: “Its been 2 weeks since we had sports so I’m here to talk to you about it”

Therefore, by simply learning to rules of the comma, one should be able to avoid the error of forgetting or misusing a comma. This allows for the writer to do less revising, editing, and proofreading on their final draft, to ascertain that they are verbalizing as an intellectual with proper

I have been a busy little bee planning out ideas for 500 First Drafts! I've even made my own blogging schedule! (I'm very proud of this) The main element I want to include is some sort of writing challenge, every week I will attempt a piece of writing: be that poetry, fiction, script writing etc. I will update you with my struggles and what websites I found useful along the way. Each Friday I will post whatever I've managed to do, even if its not finished, even if I don't like it. I can tell you're currently questioning my reasoning/sanity. Why would I post something unfinished and poorly written? Because apparently I enjoy torturing myself ... but in all seriousness, it's to push myself outside my comfort zone. During university we were given weekly writing tasks which forced me to write quickly and often, unfortunately over the past year I have fallen out of this habit, and the best way to get good at something is to do it over and over and over and over and over until your fingers hurt and the sound of the tippity tappity keys on your laptop make you want to scream ...

Okay, so as I’m sure you, the reader (whom I assume is Mrs. Zig) know that you asked the class to write about the hardest decision we’ve ever had to make. If you, the reader, are in fact Mrs. Zig, don’t read this on a Tuesday because it will only worsen your mood and instill with undeniable certainty that terrible Tuesdays are in fact the day that wretched things rear their ugly heads and decide to go crashing through the day like a bull in a china shop [cue to stop HERE].

Another quality a writer should have in his or her paper is giving examples or things that the readers would find useful and use it themselves. In William Zinsser’s “The Act of Writing: One Man’s Method”  he gives a lot of information on writing a paper and how to improve my writing skills. He talks about “editing, cutting and revising” (166). The one that I use the most, after learning from him, is the bracket method. He says that, “The brackets might surround the little qualifiers… sentence that… repeats what the previous sentence…”(167). I use the brackets idea and it makes my essay a little better. It really helps me to see what I had already said in the other sentence, so I can change the sentence or delete it. Another writer that gives out good information is Lewis Thomas. In “Notes on Punctuation”, Thomas talks about all kinds of punctuation. He gives information on the parenthesis, semicolon, colon, dash, comma, exclamation and quotation marks. Before I read his essay I didn’t know what or how to use a

If it weren’t impossible, I’d give my two weeks’ notice. Why would I want to quit? Well, I am sure you have thoughts about leaving, when the days are ragging on and it is tough at work, me too. Some of family members don’t work, and I am 57 years old, they younger. Most of my friends have the summer off, I can’t socialize with my friends therefore, just doesn't seem fair. However, here is my dilemma, my writing ideas start to flow at night, and I don’t want stop, I am enjoying the experience, till start falling sleep in my chair, then climb into my bed, another thought popped into my head, and I have to write down, when finally fall to sleep just before my alarm goes off in the morning, I am exhausted, therefore my body is talking back with

To help me improve on my punctuation I will read Punctuation and Mechanics chapter in A Writer’s Reference. By reading that chapter I think I will learn about coordinating conjunctions and different ways to users use commas and when to use them. I hope to gain more skills that will help me improve as a writer while I write my Hegemonic essay and by using resources that are provided at the TLC and in A Writer's Reference book I believe will help me tremendously in my writing journey.

if I can fill my mind's empty space with questions, I’ll never have to answer the ones which came before. I'm constantly wasting time, constantly asking “where does time goes?” or more importantly, “How can I to make time stop?” or at least make it "wait for me?”

Have you ever been given an assignment where you say to yourself, “how the heck am I going to do this?” or maybe, “what am I supposed to write about?” Well that’s exactly how I felt, thought, and did with this writing journey. Coming up with something to say about my writing journey has been difficult. I would be bold enough to say nearly impossible. So impossible it’s like trying to get a camel through the eye of a needle. Okay that might be an exaggeration, but it has been difficult. The idea that I have a writing journey I understand. But thinking of an event or something that has made my writing the way it is has been difficult. So, what I’ve decided to do then is to write about my writing journey writing this paper.

I think it is wonderful that you do not have any anxieties about writing. I wish I had the same level of confidence that you do. What would you recommend for people, like me, who struggle with their writing?

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.

My expectation for Techniques of Writing were that I would enhance my writing skills and learn to enjoy writing. Both of my expectation where met in the class. I truly believe that this class has made me a better writer. On the first day, I did not want to write every day about topics that I did not get to make my own but it turned out that most of the time I was creating my own writing off of some basic building blocks. Being able to express my own writing made me enjoy the class as a whole. I choose three pieces to revise The Night of a Starry Sky, A Day at Disney World, and Character Sketch to share with the readers.