Reflective Essay: The Development Of My Writing Skills

I immensely struggled when writing. Taking my scrambled thoughts and uncoordinated analysis and converting it into clean and understandable words on a page was arduous. I could not express my thoughts in proper academic format. I understood the importance of writing to every subject. It was essential that I learn to condense my ideas and feeling into coherent written word. After much debate, I decided that the best way to improve my writing skills was to take an advanced English course.

My writing skills have fluctuated throughout the semester. I feel, although, I have mastered leads and headline writing. Leads and headlines were the first writing skills we practiced and have continued to practice throughout the entire semester. The continuous practice of leads and headline writing throughout the semester, I feel confident in my ability to write concise, eye-catching leads and headlines. For writing assignment three I needed to provide a follow-up headline and corresponding lead for a criminal case. The headline had to focus on the upcoming sentencing hearing because it was the newest information about the case. In order to do so, as I mention in my blog entry, I had to write several drafts for both my headline and lead. [INSERT BLOG PICTURE] After many drafts of the lead I settled on a summary-lead because the article was a follow-up story about an established criminal case. I wrote the headline after I wrote the lead because the headline had to be a shorter, more intriguing version of the lead. After many drafts I finally wrote a six worded, eye-catching headline that was about the sentencing hearing. [INSERT WRITING ASSIGNMENT

My writing essays represent a timeline of improvement , from my first essay to my last essay I’ve noticed my growth as a writer. It was not until later on the semester that I realized that I lacked substantial academic vocabulary and had ongoing run on sentences, grammatical errors. My word choice was really repetitive with the constant use certain words. I have progressed where I have expanded my ability to use clear description and make my technical information clear. For example when writing essay 2 and 3 having to insert figures helped me portray my argument much more clearly. When addressing the figures in my writing they had become much more clear. Considering our class revolved around technological developments of the future it was very

I’ve always felt that my writing could use improvement in several areas including grammar, punctuation, style, and tone. My writing included emails, memorandums, and police reports, which went against proper use of grammar. Often times the words were abbreviated and no punctuation were included when the reports were transcribed. I recently started writing college level papers again, as I have not taken any college courses since 1998. I have occasional trouble with proper usage of punctuation, and placement of commas. I think I’ve seen tremendous improvement for my first paper that I wrote this February; however I do occasionally struggle in this area. Occasionally my style of writing seems to be biased, and at times I force my point during my arguments. Lastly, the tone of my writing can often be misinterpreted as controversial, and argumentative. Most of the information about my

Over the eighth grade year, I have learned to effectively use feedback and reflection skills to strengthen my writing. These writing processes taught me to include peer and teacher feedback along with self-reflection to earn a better grade on my writing pieces. In the beginning of the year, I would simply complete the drafts my teacher assigned. Proof of my original writing process is shown in the essay, titled One Necessity of a Hero: Personal Sacrifice, in which it reflects on the Thematic Unit. To demonstrate my poor writing process, a segment of my original introduction stated, “After analyzing documents from The Hobbit Thematic Unit, I discovered that the principles of heroism involve personal sacrifice. I also learned that a hero is

Over the course of my studies at university, I have grown and learned more about academic writing and numerous writing styles. I believe there is so much room for me to master my writing skills to succeed and complete my degree and improve my academic writing and personal skills through more practice. However, I have become concerned with my first attempt submitting my piece of paper through the online test in the Writers’ Diet diagnostic tool and was labelled ‘flabby’ in my writing. Analysing my errors and referring to the textbook ’Communication Toolkit’ by Grellier and Goerke (2014), also submitting my piece of writing to Grammarly and paper rater I was able to measure my weakness in the area of sentence structure, punctuation and grammar.

     One of the techniques I am going to use through out college is talking to

“Teachers won’t be able to read what you write if you don’t make your handwriting more neater” I heard this statement almost every time I brought homework home or a test; or anything that involved me putting more than my name on a piece of paper; back to my house. For someone only in first grade that was a lot to have to worry about knowing that my handwriting was so bad that my teachers, my mother, AND I couldn’t understand it. To make matters worse my teacher was in the process of teaching all of us to read and write in cursive so that wasn’t going to make my writing more coherent or understandable. I would have to say with no doubt in my mind that i hated writing in first grade hell i hated writing all through elementary school

As a college student writing is something that I have trouble doing. After struggling through high school with the same issues, I told myself that I was going to improve my writing skill one way or another. The three main things that I should focus on in order to get my writing skills to part are: 1. outlining, I always over look outlining because I hate to break writing down. 2. Finding someone to look over my paper, sometimes the idea of asking people to look at your writing and see if they find mistakes is hard. Criticism can be hard on you at times. 3. Do a more thorough search of my topic, usually when I research information I just get the first information that I find, but I should get deeper in my searches then I currently do. I think that these three things have not affected my communication, but

I always thought that my writing skills were pretty good until I started this class. It has been thirteen years since I graduated high school and I quickly realized that I had a lot of “refreshing” to do as far as writing papers. I actually felt very discouraged when I took the grammar test and did not score very well. I knew that I had to dedicate myself and put a lot of effort into this class to really improve. The practice quizzes were a major help to refresh on everything I must have forgotten since high school. Being able to write a quality paper is a skill that everyone should master. Writing is such a major part of communication in this day and age so being able to write an intelligent paper will benefit you not just through school but also through life. Writing skills are a reflection of intelligence and I want to perfect my writing the best that I can. Being able to write a quality paper is a skill that everyone should master. Writing is such a major part of communication in this day and age so being able to write an intelligent paper will benefit you not just through school but also through life. Writing skills are a reflection of intelligence and I want to perfect my writing the best that I can.

America is a place full of immigrants with no single ethnicity or race. America can also be referred to as the ?Melting Pot? because it consists ingredients of multicultural backgrounds. There are cultures such as French American, Asian American, Italian American and African American. I am Mexican American. My culture has helped me to become the writer I am today. My bicultural background and constant moving back and forth from Mexico to America has both influenced and weakened my writing. Although I was born in America, my Mexican culture has always been a part of my life. I have spent the majority of my life in Mexico, and Spanish is my first

This fall semester in ESL 91has been pretty interesting, and so far successful. The main object of this semester was to improve our essay writing. We were taught various lab techniques that helped us to improve our English writing skills, such as using appropriate verb tense and how to write a research paper with a works cited. Through my work on the research paper I have learned how to write in an academic style, how to find appropriate sources from an academic database, and how to cite my sources. Most of all, I can say that my reading skills have improved because the research for our papers required me to do a lot of critical reading.

My writing skills are decent, if I take the time to fully process my thoughts. When it is a timed assignment or test, my skills go right out the window, I concentrate more on answering the prompt rather than the grammar, punctuation, or structure. It’s like a jumbled mess of writing filled with lots of errors. When I’m writing my main goals are to answer the prompt, have good structure, and no grammatical or punctuation errors. These goals sometimes get in the way of me expressing myself freely; if a sentence doesn’t flow right with rest of the paragraph, I will re-examine my paragraph or paper to see if I can conjure up a sentence to finish out my paragraph before moving on to the next paragraph. Another example is if I feel like I don’t

My writing skill was very terrible when I started to study writing in the United States. I have studied English for almost 6 years in Japan, but it was only for listening, reading, and grammar part. I started from zero of English writing in the United States. The basic line was accustomed to writing, so free writing, which I didn't recognize that any rules and regulations of writing. I was eventually familiar with writing sentences, then I followed to write a specific topic with an introductory sentence and concluding sentences, which was a paragraph. Preparing to write an essay, I learned an effective introduction and conclusion to reader get involved into my handwriting. Finally, I learned any types of writing essays on this quarter such as an argumentative essay, a summary-response essay, and a citation/paraphrase essay. Therefore, my writing ability prepares to study in ESL 5.

Before I started this course my writing was standard, and I had not yet developed skills that have made me the exceptional writer I am presently. I have improved as a writer by utilizing these skills and developing my own style of writing. Some of the skills I have learned are critical thinking, locating scholarly research, supporting opposing viewpoints, writing to a variety of audiences, drafting my own writing, improving on grammar, punctuation and mechanics. Showing these skills throughout the assignments I have wrote in GSW 1110, proves that I am prepared to not only move on to other college writing courses, but also to use the skills to influence change in the workplace and the community.