My Writing Process Analysis

Over the past four months, I have made great strides as a writer. The area where I have seen the most growth is in my use of the writing process. Prior to my enrollment in this course, I would sit down and write all my papers in one sitting. This class has taught me how to lay out a plan for my papers. I have learned how to effectively brainstorm/research, draft, and revise my writings before I complete them. Also I have learned to not just stop there, instead I am now going back and reflecting on my work after I complete it. This allows me to identify where I prospered and also where my downfalls may have been. With this information, I am able to apply this to future writings of mine; lessons that will stay with me forever.

When assigned my first essay, “My Greatest Accomplishment,” I took time to brainstorm different ideas that defined me. The accomplishment that stood out the most to me was qualifying for State Track in four events on a sprained ankle. While writing this essay, I felt like a baby learning how to walk. My writing was unsteady and I took a few tumbles trying to get the paragraphs to flow. This reminded me of trying to run on my sprained ankle at the State-qualifying meet. However, like I finished the paper, I finished my events with qualifying times. I knew the essay would prove difficult, but I grew hopeful while writing because I knew I had numerous

Finding your own writing process is crucial for a writer in order to write a successful paper. Everyone is unique and everyone’s writing process is going to be unique as well. A writer’s notebook is a perfect way for people to record random thoughts, dialogue you hear, and any other ideas you might hear. Brainstorming is a key technique to get started when composing a paper. Brainstorming allows you to think of different topics that would fulfill the requirements needed on your topic assigned. Freewriting, clustering, listing and outlining, and collaborating are also some other techniques that when practiced could come very useful when writing a paper. Having the ability to use either of these five techniques would help tremendously when composing a paper.

“Hey, you! Pay attention!” A common statement I tell myself anytime I try to write a paper. Procrastination is a large portion of my writing process. I believe my best work is produced when I’m in a time crunch. The stress of time running out just makes the thoughts flow like a river of words.

Writing is a process that requires brain work. In order to write you would need grammar skills. I feel like a huge part in writing is to be able to plan out and know how to categorize your ideas into different paragraphs. For some people writing is a way to escape for a while. For others writing is a traumatic thing they would never want to do unless they have no other option.

Writing an essay in college is a big challenge for most students, including myself. It involves strong critical thinking and a meticulous process. After narrowing down and selecting a topic, we then need to establish the main point and how we want to deliver our opinions, ideas, or visions to our audience. We want to create a piece of writing that delivers a clear message, with strong and relevant details, to support the main point. We need to think and plan thoroughly, write, review, and rewrite before we get the end result. This is why drafting, reviewing, revising, and editing are vital parts of writing.

This activity was a very fair assessment of me. Math has always been my strongest suit and it showed through the report as well. The writing portion showed that there is somethings that I do need to work on. I always use “http://www.paperrater.com/free_paper_grader “ when writing papers and even these discussion board posts. It helps me immensely with my writing mechanics and becoming a better writer.

How will you use knowledge and skills you’ve developed in this class in your academic career / life? Give examples.

In all reality, I think I’ve maybe wrote ten actual essays in my life, if even that. I went to a small school that taught us more on how to act proper, respectful, and thoughtful rather than things that may benefit our future schooling. I do love that they taught us all of that because it made me a better person but on the other hand it did set me a few steps back when it came to school. I wish they would have made us write more and put more effort into our school because trying to learn it all when you’re in middle or even high school can be embarrassing. So, since I was too embarrassed that I knew nothing on writing I just always pushed it out of the way and hoped I’d eventually learn it on my own, which never happened.

This is a personal narrative that I wrote for my CSU application, and this piece helped me get accepted into Colorado State University. I wrote this piece completely outside of class during the first semester of my senior year. I didn’t take this to a teacher conference, but this is a piece that I am very proud of because I feel like the writing represents my person voice and not a character. However I had trouble figuring out how to put my thoughts into words, but I worked through the confusion and now my word choice flows very nicely.

I have always had a tough time with writing essays and doing stories. I never fully understood how to write an essay until I got help during summer school. I probably learned more about writing essays during the summer than I did during my freshman and most of my sophomore year. I really appreciated learning how to write an essay because it is a skill I’m going to use for the rest of my life. Now that I fully understand how to write them, I definitely enjoy writing essays. My favorite essay to write was the superhero one, but I wish I had more time to write on it because I’m sure I could have done a lot better.

When you write an essay like this, you look in the mirror and see who you are and what makes up your character. I realized mine was cemented that day when I was 10 years old. Even then, I started to see that when I spoke to someone, they spoke back. And that felt good.

That day when I got home from school I went straight to my computer to type the essay that I had been dreading so much all week. I began writing and surprisingly, it was really easy. I knew exactly what to say and I was halfway finished before I knew it.

The light grey, concrete building rose from the ground, looking like something out of a dystopian novel. I was rapidly approaching Herter Hall, where my dreaded College Writing class would take place, with an overwhelming urge to turn around. I was so anxious because up until my first semester at college, writing had been synonymous with pure stress. In all of my previous writing classes, I was either assigned literary analysis papers, or papers on the same controversial issues (gun control or the death penalty). Furthermore, I was always instructed to follow a very specific format, which made my essays very repetitive. After four years of writing nearly the same essay, I had become very frustrated because my creativity and perspective was being confined. Despite my hatred for the class, I considered myself to be a decent writer. Seldom did I get lower than an A on an essay in high school, and most teachers gave me praise for my insightful analysis. That being said, I knew college writing would be more difficult than high school, and I was nervous because I severely lacked revision skills. In the past, I would become very partial to my writing and turned a blind eye to poor sentence structure, organization, or style choices. As a result, my essays were generally only looked over for grammatical errors.

Writing has been a part of my life since I was in elementary school. I read a lot of books, and wrote many fiction stories for fun. I know that I can express myself best through writing, so even essay assignments were and are a form of my communication. But since it was creative writing outside of classes that was entertaining to me, essays where I had to follow many rules were never enjoyable. However, the very first formal essay assigned in this English class felt different from the other essays I was assigned to from the past. The process of brainstorming about what I actually cared about in life, the education system, and actually writing my thoughts out was not as boring as any other papers I had to write about. More specifically, I enjoyed writing the three short fictional stories that I decided to do for the medium through which I communicated my idea about the changes needed in our modern education. Our high school education system focuses too much on general education, and does not allow time for students to discover what they truly love to do. But ironically, the students are expected to know what they want to major in even before their final year of high school ends. I feel that through this assignment, although it has not changed my world, it has prepared me to communicate my ideas more enjoyably and thoroughly.