Writing Strengths And Weaknesses

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.

I was pushed constantly to work harder at my writing. I studied and practiced several new techniques and methods for prewriting and organizing the essays I found so hard to create. At first, I had quite a few bad days and quite a few subpar essays. My grades would vary greatly from paper to paper. This really scared me, as I hoped to keep myself from drastically dropping in my grades. Yet, I wanted to maintain my grade point average so I had no choice but to succeed and impress around every corner. I began to pour in, even more, work and apply all of the newly learned skills from that class into my mind. I hoped that soon I would be able to find a system for writing that helped me form proper

Chapter ten is all about, as a teacher, being able to assess the writing skill of students and knowing different ways to keep the students interested. Along with talking about the underlying issues when it comes to the different ways writing is taught and evaluating the skills of writing students. For me, growing up I can’t tell you how much I disliked having to write papers in high school because we would talk a little about what the teacher wanted and then we were set to do it on our own, then given a grade and that was it. I always wanted more feedback than what I got so with the next writing assignment I could do better than the previous. After reading this chapter three main content areas that stuck out to me were; what do grades mean, objectivity in assessment, and how to make assessments reliable.

Throughout the course of this semester in AP Lang, my eyes have been opened to many of the weaknesses I never knew I had in writing. Coming into this semester, I had heard about the difficulty of this class, but was not unduly worried about not receiving an A; I have always considered myself as a competent if not strong writer. However, after failing to attain desired grades on several important essays, I was devastated, and realized that although I had mastered the basics of grammar and writing, there was still much for me to work on. Also, I did not understand that much of my grade in AP Lang would be determined by speaking in front of others, which is not my strong suit. What I have come to find is that writing essays containing all of the new information we have learned throughout the semester, such as requirements for different types of essays and good writing strategies, takes a lot of work, time, and thinking. Unfortunately, my procrastination caused me to only get done what had to be done instead of putting in the extra work and truly understanding everything.

As I look back, College Composition has improved my writing techniques and skills by directing me through tons of practice with writing, readings, and examples from the textbook, in-class discussions and helped me notice my strengths and weaknesses as an English student. Some of my strengths that can be shown in my previous essays are: my ability to free-write with lots of detail, structuring an essay correctly, constructing a very well organized and detailed essay, and manage time and use it to construct a well- thoughtful essay, my thesis statements in all four of my essays were structured correctly, and also, it can take me less time to come up with a debatable topic for my essay than it did at the beginning of the semester; therefore, I have quite a bunch of weaknesses, it can take me a while to start an essay, still to this day, and I can’t begin to write an essay without completing the introduction paragraph first, every now and then the structure of my sentences can cause a problem and a hard time for the reader to understand what I’m really trying to say, and trying to get my point to come across clearly may be a challenge for me as well; also, I’ve noticed that in my previous essays I had put a few commas in the wrong places or missed some commas in a sentence, I have also misused semi-colons, sometimes I have used the wrong word or phrase in a sentence which has made my sentences really unclear and ending an essay with a conclusion paragraph can take me some time

When I stop to think about the memory’s that I have made during my first semester of college; there are both good and bad pieces or times that present themselves. Often with many things there are gray areas, and writing would fall in there for me. I fortunately understand now that I have times where I can over look many of my writing flaws. Such as sentence structure! This by far was my biggest problem in this class, and I fully understand why. Personally I have times that will type up a paragraph and never notice the mistake. That is until someone points it out to me. It’s almost like my brain knows that something is wrong with it, but for some unknown reason it won’t register when I’m revising my paper. So as a writer I have realized that I need to take advantage of people around me and get their feedback on my essay’s; because

The Plain English Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of how to write clearly and effectively. Although several techniques are mentioned, I will select two strengths and areas of development.

I have been a student at the University of Texas for almost a whole semester now. I came to this school straight out of high school, not knowing what I was getting myself into. During my high school years, I was good at every subject except my writing class. Coming to UTSA, I knew I was going to struggle in my writing class, but that didn’t discourage me from not trying my best in the course. Going through the English program, I realized that I had some strengths and weaknesses in the class and it encouraged me to do better. The essays I have written for this class demonstrate that I have developed a strong thesis, organization skills, and detail; however, I still need to improve on grammar, keeping the POV, and citing.

In the first essay I typed, titled the Mustache and the Morons, I had many errors. I had no idea of the common mistakes I make in my grammar. For example, when I tried to explain who was in on my prank, I said, “Katelyn is my partner in crime.” Rereading it I can clearly see it was wrong, but when I was typing it, it came naturally that I spoke in present tense. As the year went on, I started noticing more and more grammar errors, and was able to correct them. Another mistake I often made was that I didn’t give in depth descriptions on what was going on or how that particular moment felt. Any readers would have received a vague idea of how amusing it was to see a mustache on a statue or the utter fear that struck my very core when we said the mustache had ripped off part of the statue. My vocabulary as expanded to a considerable size since then and that has made me able to make my story or words come alive. I had countless errors to the point that when my essay was handed back, my once white paper was practically covered in purple ink. Although I had a smile on my face when I took these essays back, I was actually in full panic on the inside. I would quickly look through everything I did wrong and wonder, ”How on earth did I not see that? I can’t believe I put that and actually turned it in!” I knew it wasn’t good but when I turned to the last page, my grade was always an acceptable one. I had to calm myself down and remind myself that this is a learning process, and I will become a better writer

Over the years, i realized i've never been good at writing. I recall freshman year going in for lunch and after school to get extra help on essays with my teacher. I there learned how to organize my essays, how to get evidence from the text, and interpret what it means. But i still to this day have many areas to improve and i've set goals to make those weaknesses into strengths.

As a writer, I feel that my weakness is struggling with time management and trying to get my best draft as my first draft. I have always struggled with trying to put forth the best draft on the first one and just making little adjustments and then turning the paper in. Another weakness I have is to over complicate my writing and over think submitting the final draft. Every single essay that I have had to write throughout this semester I have struggled with these problems. Particularly the research paper, since the paper was worth such a big percentage of the grade in the class. I was extremely self-conscious about submitting and writing the paper. I took a long time just to finish a rough draft. I reviewed the final draft for hours before submitting the paper. I also experienced the problem of being extremely self-conscious after I submitted the paper and question everything I choose to write on.

Considering my essay and rubric there are some strengths and weaknesses. In my essay, i felt like the setting of my story was good as well as the body of the essay. What i mean by this is by my choice of words, variety of verbs, format, and how easy it is to read. The overall quality of my writing in my opinion was the best part. I feel like the details I used really gave my paper character. Details such as how I used to write on a lot of the things I owned, how in the sixth and seventh grade I wrote an 18 page paper on a Cinderella story, and how I loved to write. Where I struggled with writing this essay would be consistency with point of view and and the five senses. A peer of mine noticed I had accidentally used the word “you” a few

Learning about myself as a reader and writer has helped me become a better student, learn effective strategies for reading and writing, and ponder my future goals.

Writing is a skill that takes time to develop. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses is very important. Being aware of your strengths can help you stand out, and your weaknesses show you areas where improvement is needed. Like everybody I have weaknesses as well as strengths, and being conscious of them helped me improve my writing skills.

Writing is not just as simple as putting words down on a document or a piece of paper, it is a process. Within this intricate process are steps that involve more than just writing, such as critical thinking, planning, and editing. Using these steps has not only helped me when planning an essay but also when composing one. Throughout this course, I have managed to improve many skills and gain a lot of strengths, but I still possess some weaknesses. Overall, I believe my strengths have definitely outgrown these weaknesses and have led to a better, more high-quality writing process which leads to improved essays.