Personal Narrative: A Change In My Writing Skills

Distant, cold, and non-existent describes my relationship with writing. My relationship with writing has never been a close relationship. Writing has always been difficult for me. I have never hated writing, but it has been a constant challenge for me. I will be discussing my fears of writing, the value of being able to express your ideas through writing, and what excites me about writing more and more.

My writing experiences have been minimal. So far I have only learned the basics of writing, like forming sentences and forming sentences to put into paragraphs. I can tell that my writing has improved throughout the years. I hope to improve in writing essays, paragraphs, stories, and speeches so that I have no errors with editing and creating the final product. I predict that I will be a well rounded writer when I graduate from Newman University.

My experiences as a writer have been both very engrossing and strenuous. I have learned a great quantity on both reading and writing, though, I continue to struggle on things that I have learned by this time, making the same mistakes that I do not even realize. Sometimes things are not so easy to understand when reading information, especially if the wording of an article is difficult for example. I love the idea of learning new things everyday. These past years as a writer have been very interesting, and I have learned and grasped many concepts I have been taught along the way.

My writing has changed a lot throughout the year. Some of my first pieces included lots of redundancies, “th” words, and things that could be changed. In addition, the sentences were not as long as they could have been. These things were brought to my attention by reviewing my writing and using the writing goal sheet. Over the semester, I have learned these little mistakes separate lower level writing from higher level writing. Reviewing my old writing and writing instruction has recently been on my mind while I write essays. They help me to write to the best of my ability. The first sentence of my essay at the beginning of the year is, “I am thirteen years old and I am interested in building and designing things.” This sentence has redundancy

This is the 25 minute writing challenge, where I’m not allowed to use the backspace button on my keyboard or edit what I’m typing. There are probably going to be many typos in this small paper, but that’s apart of the challenge as I can't edit anything. I honestly have no clue what to write about, but atleast I’m 3 minutes in right now.

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

The best writing I’ve ever produced is from last semester I wrote a paper for Sociology on how the movie “Selma” related to what we were learning in class. This is the best writing I’ve produced because I thought long and hard about what I was going to write and ended up making a 100 on the paper which I was very excited about. Another reason is that I’m not particularly exceptional at writing I struggle with what words to use and how to really make my writing mean something to the person reading it, and my teacher left me a comment saying how I had thought outside the box and done very well. When I’m writing, my only fear is that I could be using better words so that’s why after I write a paper I always like to continuously edit it until I’m satisfied. Challenges for me are thinking of what to write I guess you could say that I get writers block and I must take breaks and really think about what I want my paper to convey, but once I get an idea usually I’m and can come up with more ideas it’s just really that first few sentences in a paragraph that get me.

As I read the comments on my Instagram post, I laugh. I had posted a picture from when I was little, so of course, my friends had to make sarcastic comments on it. While I was reading them I noticed words like “lol”, “tho”, and “bc”. I was five in the picture and I was not taught to write like that. No one was. We were taught to read beyond our level, write grammatically correct, spell right, and speak clearly. Well at least that was what my sister, Riley, taught me when we turned her bedroom into a classroom and played school. Riley is two years ahead of me in school. When she would come home, she would teach me what she learned that day. I loved playing school and it gave me an appreciation for reading and writing because we did it for fun. This also allowed me to strive for more than average since she was teaching me things the others wouldn’t learn for a couple of years.

Throughout the first semester, I already feel as though I have learned multiple skills that push my writing to a higher level. I have never worked with “They Say, I Say” before, and all of the readings that we have done so far associated with that book added new aspects to my writing than ever before. In particular, I have noticed a large change in my ability to introduce and summarize a piece of writing that I am analyzing before adding my own opinion or take on a subject. Instead of consistently summarizing points of the piece throughout my writing, I improved upon my skills and can now effectively and concisely summarize the piece before introducing any of my own opinions. Additionally, the class discussion that we had about the purpose of a concluding paragraph, in my opinion, helped improve my skills in answering the question: so what?

In high school I challenged my writing skills by taking advanced placement language and literature. Both courses assigned essays that required scholarly text to support my points and ideas stated throughout the paper. My biggest takeaway from these classes was that having textual evidence from reliable sources will help strengthen my writing, also known as ethos to persuade the audience. During my junior year I grasped the concept of ethos, pathos, and logos, how each could be used to shape writing concepts or perspectives. Personally it takes me a little bit of time to adjust from different writing contexts that need to be addressed, but I always thoroughly analyze instructions to reach success. I improve as a student when I practice analyzing

When it comes to writing I have a mental breakdown, I get nervous, overthink, and emotionally stressed. These three words describe me as a writer. In high school I would have a difficult time starting papers, often times my weaknesses was grammar and sentences fragments. How I feel about writing is how I feel when a love one dies. It's like as if I'm at a funeral and my paper is the one being funeralized. I think the reason why I am how I am about writing is because my college English teacher in high school was so harsh on my papers, and ever since then I've been traumatize to write papers.

I am glad I got to read what Prose wrote about learning to write by reading. This explains why I am not a good writer, because I have never been a good reader either. I grew up in a culture where reading was very rare, plus finding a book to read was hard. I do agree with her that reading enhances writing. Most of the time when I write I tend to follow the tone or the structure of what I read before. I also agree with her that sometimes a good writer puts you to shame. I have read peer papers in class before and sometimes I was blown away by the good work I was reading.

Reading these pages and the documents were interesting and they definitely helped me realize my mistakes in my writing. I always get nervous whenever I write an essay and it stresses me out if I made a lot of mistakes.

Through this assignment, I have learned some new writing skills and recalled some of the writing strategies I learned from my previous writing courses at UC Davis. For instance, I learned that free-write is a good technique in writing because it allows writers to write down all their ideas without judging them. I will definitely apply this technique in my future assignments not only in this course, but also other courses that require me to write.

In this semester my achievement of improving my writing skills has increased significantly. My sentence lengths vary in a positive manner along with my word choice improving, becoming more complex and of writing expectation. My main struggle this semester would be the peer editing. Although I have improved significantly I still find it difficult to edit others papers. Further more than the common spelling and grammatical errors. I believe my essays have improved drastically from the beginning of the semester towards the end.