Tri C Reflection

The art of writing is a complex and difficult process. Proper writing requires careful planning, revision, and proofreading. Throughout the past semester, the quality of my writing has evolved significantly. At first, I struggled with the separation of different types of paragraphs, and I found writing them laborious. Constant practice, however, has eliminated many of my original difficulties, and helped to inspire confidence in my skills. As a collegiate writer, my strength lies in my clear understanding of the fundamentals of writing, while my primary weakness is proofreading my own work.

The checklist titled “Checklist for Revising and Editing”, in The Little Seagull Handbook, provided eight great tips for revision of a paper. The tips ranged from appealing to a specific audience to punctuation errors. The biggest issues I have with writing are sentence structure and punctuation and mechanics.

The writing handbook I use is The Little Seagull Handbook. The specific area I see myself making the most mistakes with punctuation is comma splices. Sometimes I place commas in sentences where I think they are supposed to be, but really they are not. I think punctuation is probably the most common mistake I make when writing a paper. I changed my second goal to providing more details and examples in my writing. I thought I expanded pretty well on important specifics in my papers, but I noticed there are still some parts where I do not provide sufficient detailed information. An example of this would be not providing enough details on my goals I make; I am striving to meet this goal by the end of the course. The way I see myself determining

Coming into this class, I wasn't sure what to expect. Of course,I expected to be writing a lot but was unsure of the type of writing and the style. I was looking forward to writing challenging pieces that stretching me creatively as a writer. I wanted to explore how to express myself in my writing because it had been a long time since I'd written a creative essay. One of my main hopes for this class was challenging myself to become a better editor of my own papers. I often find it a tedious and laborious process to find and edit the grammatical errors in my papers. However, this is an important skill that I need to develop for my future as a successful writer.

For the past fifteen years I have learned how to spell, write sentences, use correct grammar and punctuation and the list continues. Over the last ten years is when writing has really come into play. I've been assigned numerous assignments that have required writing which has taught me my specific writing style. A few things that I like about my writing style consist of the following: I consider myself a creative writer, I have a fairly good vocabulary and excellent grammar. A few things that need improvement in my writing are the use of commas, run on sentences and the formatting of my papers. Although those specific writing characteristics may be basic they are the three that are most challenging for me.

While I’m very good at organizing my paper, I do have a hard organizing my ideas occasionally. By that I mean that sometimes I simply don’t know what I want to say, or how to say it. Once I start getting an idea of how I want to write a paper, it starts working itself out, but sometimes it can be easier said than done, depending on the topic. I am also absolutely atrocious with punctuation. I generally know when it’s time to put a period at the end of the sentence, but my main problem is mostly commas. My other major problems are when to use colons, semicolons, hyphens, or when to start the next paragraph. Lastly, I’m not very good at forming sentences. This mostly linked to punctuation again, and not about word choice. However, I find I’m always questioning whether I have a run-on sentence, fragment sentence, or if I’m doing something else

I believe I have grown a lot since the beginning of this course. My writing was severely lacking grammar and punctuation. I didn’t use any punctuation other than periods and very few commas spersed throughout my papers. My papers still need help in that area, but I have improved. I now know where they need to go and when it’s appropriate to use them. My papers aren’t exactly flawless but they are better than before. I would write how I speak at times and I knew it wasn’t right, but I would still do it because it allowed my papers to flow better in my mind. I read my papers out loud to help avoid my problem with writing how I speak. I’ve learned my writing style in this course, or lack thereof. I found a program that would benefit me now and

In my writing, I was having grammar and punctuation issues. I used second person instead of the first person and vague words, like “things”. I had pronouns misused, commas left out and used two words with the same meaning in a paragraph. Also in sentences, numbers need to be spelled out instead of writing down that number. In MLA format, the dates

An aspect that I often struggle with is proper punctuation. Truthfully, I do not know how to correctly use punctuation. When writing, I place punctuation by mimicking authors’ formats or by placing them where it feels right. This is present in all of my writing, but I am attempting to improve. Punctuation also plays a part in another weakness of mine, one that is most likely present within this essay. Since middle school, it was engrained in my mind that a good essay is a long essay, so I have a tendency for wordiness. To elongate an essay, I tend to add needless words and sentences. For example, in the rough draft of the Whole Process Essay, I added several unrelated occurrences to elongate the paragraphs. Although my essays were long and wordy, the professor commented on vagueness and unclearness within the whole process and practice essay. Sometimes, I disregard the fact that the reader might not know what it is I am writing about or the sentence makes perfect sense to me. The latter is the most common, I quickly read the sentence and it appears fine to me. Within the Whole Process Essay, another weakness was brought to my attention. I lack structure, a key element in effective writing. Within the same essay and a few others, I simply added what felt right, sometimes the result would be acceptable but in other instances, it was a long, jumbled mess.

The mission/vision of my company, TRICOR, is to prepare offenders for success after release (TRICOR, 2016). TRICOR was created as a public service and non-governmentally funded to provide the occupational and life skills training for Tennessee’s incarcerated population. TRICOR’s programming provides job training, program opportunities and transitional services that are designed to assist the offender population that is soon to be released back into society with successful reintegration.

C100 improved our basic skills and knowledge base, in order to succeed at CGSC and at future FORSCOM Units. C100 had three sections: thinking and problem solving; individual development; and communications. C120 helped me to become a more critical and creative thinker. This block enabled me to improve my decision-making and leadership skills by executing three practical exercises. These exercises were, problem solving, a Gaza Strip study, and dissecting the Army Warfighting Challenges. C130 focused on my personal development while at CGSC and the future at operational units. It helped me plan and focus my priorities for the next 10 years by establishing an individual development plan (IDP). C170 enabled me to become a better communicator

C100 allowed me the opportunity to realize areas of concerns as it pertained of writing, briefing, and critical thinking. The writing class influenced me the most, as it pertains to improving my writing, as I prepared to start the grading portion of the CGSC The course allowed instructors to show prior writing assignments by former CGSC students writing products, good and bad. These examples informed students what the CGSC staff expects it pertains to writing assignments. This was invaluable as I had questions pertaining to the history writing. This academic environment allowed me to brief to my peers; grammar topics which I improved my briefing and communication skills. In addition, the C100 course allowed members our staff group to learn

A common trend among my papers has been my sentence structure. For the most part, my sentences would be short and very straight forward. A common mistake that I see among many of my peers is writing consciously, a problem I do not have. I like that I can get right to the point which allowed me to be more direct in stating my facts and less worried about filling my paper with fluff. By the end of the semester, I learned to make my sentences more balanced which would allow me to have more flow throughout my paper. As the semester went on I started to pay closer attention to the length and the content of each sentence and how each correlated with each other. I took a skill I had coming into the class and

I quite enjoy writing, and I am generally comfortable with it for the most part. The videos provided for last weeks assignments were quite helpful in clarifying some things for me. I feel that the introduction of semi colons really helped my writing flow the way I had intended. I do not generally have issues with run on sentences; however, I was finding the odd comma splice in my writing. I also frequently over used the word "and". Introducing semi colons helped to address these issues. I downloaded the grammarly application, and it is quite helpful. I also use paperater. It is a wonderful alternative to, or accompaniment for, grammarly, as it offers a lot of free services. Both services are fabulous and have helped me improve my writing

Throughout the semester, I have gained skills necessary for understanding and utilizing logic while writing. I am now aware that for any writing to be scholarly, it must possess an introductory section, a body and a conclusion section. Further, I am now able to understand as well as utilize most of the basic techniques useful in pre-writing, revision and editing. Through writing the “downloading from torrents” paper, I acquired skills in word processing, sentence elements, and punctuation. Further, I developed some special skills in writing a website analysis which is a critical aspect in contemporary learning as argued by Flateby (p 182). As the semester folds, I believe that I have gained the prerequisite skills in writing and critical thinking. However, I need to improve much on some of the common problems in writing that seems to disturb me especially grammar.