Personal Review: Hi Lindiwe

My past writing life has allowed me to learn and grow and develop my voice. The more I write, the more I understand what my voice is and how to use it. Trying to restrict myself to the five-paragraph essay structure inhibits my voice and makes it increasingly more difficult to showcase who I am as a writer in the world. When I remove that structure, I believe my voice can be heard loud and clear. When I write, I can explain my thoughts and ideas succinctly, and I believe that allows me to accomplish what I am trying to do more quickly. I am better at communicating through writing, which has been and will hopefully continue to be a great asset for me as I go through life.

After this semester of English 102, at Bristol Community College I feel that I have gained the skill to articulate what I want to convey to the reader in many ways. I don’t just look at grammatical error, but instead I look for ways to make my sentences more effective and concise. Nevertheless, I hope that this strategy will continue to help me improve my writing even further on in the future.

Furthermore, I think the strength of my essay was my thesis and supporting ideas of the

Recognizing the source of common errors in subject-verb agreement will help you avoid these errors in your writing.

The essay I was assigned is “How To Write With Style” by Kurt Vonnegut. After reading the essay, I found that a theme that would best summarize it is “effective communication. Kurt Vonnegut writes in his essay about how one should write in order to attract the reader and effectively communicate your thoughts. His advice to writing as he calls it “How To Write With Style” provides an insight to some elements that allows the writer to effectively communicate his thoughts and be true to him or herself. Keeping it simple, Have the guts to cut, Sound like yourself, Say what you mean to say, Pity the readers are his advice to writers to become effective writers. After reading the essay, I looked at several stories and poems that shared a similar

The power of the written word, it is something I believe in; and having read an essay, I can not believe that anyone, even a college admission officer, could entirely separate their personal opinion of the essay from the academic worthiness of the student. Unlike oral traditions, the written word has stability, portability and permanence, the same piece of work may be read and reread exactly as it was first written. Writing allows us to make our thoughts visible to others; it gives us the ability to express and explain complex events, emotions, and situations. Words can wound, they can inspire, they can inflame a populace to revolution or assuage them to lasting peace; they give voice to those who would be silenced, preserve our fondest memories and offer the only true freedom some

These errors have weakened my writing and have drawn away attention from my content. I need to pay close attention in the future to these reoccurring mistakes. I have also learnt in this course that long paragraphs concerning one topic should be reviewed, and I should create a backwards outline so that I am able to break them down into several smaller paragraphs with different focal points. I have learnt how important grammar and organization is in my work and that I should not only pay attention to the content, which I have done previously. Grammar can change the whole meaning and understanding of a piece of writing, now I am well aware of this and hope to improve this throughout the rest of the course.

My “best” piece is my rhetorical analysis written about a high school senior’s controversial yearbook picture. I feel that this essay in particular is the best one I wrote because it demonstrates both my strengths and weaknesses as a writer. This essay was one of the more difficult ones to write. At the beginning of the semester we focused on primarily on personal writing, “showing not telling” and the use of colorful language. For this essay, however, we focused on the academic knowledge, logic and criticism aspects of writing. Admittedly so, I disliked writing this essay. Writing this essay was a new experience for me because I had never focused on the negative aspects of someone else’s work. Re-reading my essay multiple times after receiving feedback from you made me question myself.

It was very to easy to have small mistakes in my paper. I use a couple grammar check websites to help me find any errors in my summary paper. I know that I have bad grammar so I use

The advances that technology has made is a bit amazing and scary. We as humans depend way to much on technology. We have become less sociable with others since cell phones have come out. People have become more into their self, and have exchanged real relationships with those that are created on a computer. I am really concerned with the fact that schools are becoming more and more technology based. I think sometimes we need to go back to the basics when it comes to teaching, but that is just my opinion.

Now that we are getting more involved with writing, I’m starting to get a little more stressed when writing a paper. I’m not a good writer but I know that with practice I will only get better. The tips and instructions provided in this course are definitely helping me eliminate some of my writing anxieties. The” Quick Comma Reference Sheet “is a tool I will continue to use in the future. I always seem to get nervous when writing a paper regardless of what it is. I am always worrying about the readers reading my work and finding my errors. I’m hoping that at the end of the class I will worry less and find writing enjoyable.

I have come a long way as a writer. I did not grow up learning English. Which left me not knowing how to properly write even a single sentence. I knew nothing about proper sentence structure nor what word to use. Over the years I have tried my best to practice and learn the different rules in writing. This portfolio serves as the evidence of my journey as a writer. This portfolio includes tools that I have acquired all throughout the course which I will be using all throughout my writing career. Each of the materials in this folder show how I broke the chains of unhappiness in writing, and feel the freedom to write what I believe in. Throughout my journey I had made numerous mistakes. I took these mistakes and learned from them. Development in writing reflects a continuous process where I will make numerous mistakes and learn from them to better myself as a writer.

Have you ever read the first chapter of a book and thought to yourself, what is this person talking about? Writers sometimes get carried away with big words and long drawn out sentences, ultimately missing their own point. When in reality what they’re really doing is taking up space on a page. Great writers recognize that it’s not about the complexity of their words that makes them good at writing, but how effective they are at getting their message across to readers. A writer should understand that the over use of words and drawn out sentences only bores and confuses the reader; making the reader less interested in what the writer has to say. The most important stage when writing an essay is getting your message across to your readers effectively, by avoiding wordiness, redundancy, and word complexity.

There are numerous errors in spelling and grammar – I did not mark all of them – and the most common is the writing in first person. This should be avoided in academic settings. It would be helpful for you to seek the assistance of the Online Writing Center to continue to improve your grammar skills.

But, through this paper there is an error in 90% of the sentences. I don’t define my writing by the clerical errors or even what is said about them but obviously it does matter to a point. There are ten marked errors in the first paragraph and I’m sure there are more. Three of those errors are wording, this is just the first paragraph. This is another reason I should be reading my own writing before deciding it’s done.