Personal Narrative: My Writing Ability

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.

During this spring semester, I have grown in many ways as a writer, and a student. I have started to realize, and accept the flaws that I have created in my writing. In the past, I never looked into my writings and saw my problems, and if I did, I did not accept that they were problems. In my writing pieces in the past, I was very hard-headed about what I thought was correct versus what was actually correct. I have also become More familiar with different formatting options on Microsoft Word to create a more professional piece or writing. However, figuring out all the parts of writing and making them work together is the most difficult part of writing.

In my first “Who I am as a Writer” paper I stated how one of the areas that I needed to improve was writing. I went into more depth talking about how my writing is not descriptive enough and how I cannot grab the reader's attention. Even though I still need to continue making improvements, I have gotten better in both of these aspects. Compared to my papers in high school my introduction paragraphs have improved.

Over the course of this semester, I have learned many things to improve my writing. Having taken the course before, this semester has been an excellent opportunity to expand on my existing knowledge. Although I had written many essays before, there is still much to be learned and improved. Two factors of writing that I had learned or improved on this semester were transitions/topic sentences and how to properly structure a conclusion paragraph.

During this semester, I have learned multiple things in English 1020. Not only have I learned new writing techniques and how to find and use credible sources, but I have also improved my writing skills. Throughout this semester, I focused on the topic of abortion, which, not surprisingly, I regretted soon after completing my annotated bibliography. However, by choosing this very biased topic I was able to give myself an academic challenge. I was challenged greatly when it came to forming and writing my own ethical opinion, as well as finding unbiased sources to help guide my research. Looking back at this semester I was faced with many bumps in the road, but now reading through the many revisions I put myself through, I have noticed the huge improvement I was able to make through this single English course.

When writing any document, the author must understand their audience before writing anything (Vandermey, 2012). Making sure my content has the attention of the reader is essential for any writer and understanding the process to write interesting material is the author’s goal (Emery, 2014). While all authors have fear and apprehensions about writing, their passion usually comes out on top when authoring a document or paper. My writing style creates fears, however, my passion to communicate properly with my audience drives my overall writing style.

Prior to entering class, I thought that I was a competent writer. However, I quickly learned that my writing was conversational and that I had little experience in academic writing. I became aware that much of my poor writing was like an old habit that I found humbling to admit and hard to correct. Passive voice, unneeded words, long sentences, were just a few of the obstacles that resulted in ineffectual writing. However, using peer reviews and an editing checklist I slowly began the journey to better writing. I also found that reading about writing provided supplementary methods to improve my writing. Implementing these new techniques, I slowly began to understand what scholarly writing entailed. As I learned through giving criticism

Thinking about our first writing assignment, one of the suggestions focuses on the comparison of writing to running, it became apparent to me that this is something I would enjoy writing about. I am a long time running advocate, competing in marathons, and a neophyte writing student, and I find many similarities in both endeavors.

Since the first day of 8th grade I have dramatically improved my writing skills. I never worked hard on my papers since before 8th and I was never a good writer. Now I have come to a point where I am more productive and creative when I write and I worked harder than I used to.

Over the course of this semester I have became a much better writer. One area specifically where I have improved my writing skills is my approach to each paper. In the beginning of the semester, I knew what I wanted to say in my papers, but I didn't know how to state them in words on paper. This made me very frustrated and often caused me to procrastinate my papers until that last minute. As the semester progressed I learned from my past mistakes and ended up getting a better grade on every single one of my papers. This gave me confidence in myself, and made approaching my papers a lot easier.

During half of my sophomore year, I've improved my writing skills so much since last year and the beginning of this year. I have been working on achieving my goal that will make my essays a whole lot better. I’ve wrote a bunch of essays so far these two quarters. I’ve also know where I am as a writer.

I have never taken an online class so I am actually very nervous on how it will go. Also, being an honors course, which I’ve never taken doesn’t make things a little better. I really enjoy writing about specific topics or ideas. Writing creatively isn’t me, but anything to help improve my writing skills. Hopefully all goes well and I pass the course to continue to move on in my degree plan.

I feel that I have improved in my writing in tons of ways. One example is my commas. I used to put a comma here and there, even if it didn't belong there. When I started my sixth grade year I didn't know comma rules or some comma causers. Looking back at previous writings I can see how much I have improved, yet I'm still not perfect with writing. I still have a few problems with commas, but I'm much better than I was. There is still room for me to improve and I look forward to it.

For the past 5 months of the semester, I’ve learnt a lot for myself, an international student, to improve my writing skills in many different fields and circumstances that I personally think is extremely important for the business world today in this class. Writing for business is not easy like it seems. Putting all the essential information and details in such a limited length can be frustrated for anyone and one small little mistake can result in a really bad consequence or lead the whole organization into a tough situation. At the beginning of the semester, I understand my strengths a little bit and how to use them in general since all the English and Communication classes I have taken, but to be honest, I didn’t expect any differences between JGEN and them.

Although I was not overly challenged in my last English class, I have several weaknesses as a writer. My biggest weakness is neglecting to ask important questions that could improve my writing. Receiving