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Self Reflection- My Writing

Over the course of this school year, I have grown tremendously as a writer. Before coming to this school, I had little writing experience. At first, having to write three major essays seemed like a daunting task, but I am very grateful that I had the opportunity to experiment and grow in the three genres of writing we were assigned. I have also gained many skills from this year, like how to write a research paper, how to analyze specific elements of a text, and how to prepare and make a decision about a topic for writing. There are countless more skills that I have developed over the course of this year, but these represent what I have improved most upon in terms of writing. I have also learned things about myself as a writer this year. Those being that my strengths are more-so in research writing and other academic works and less in free writing and narrative works. I have also learned that I struggle with coming up with a topic and idea for a piece. However, I have improved greatly u...
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Second Semester Writing Center Reflection

In the second semester, I visited the writing center for my research paper. Before I went in, I created a plan for what I wanted my Writing Fellow to help me with. This plan included an overall grammar and sentence structure check, an organization check, and help with my conclusion. First, my Writing Fellow had me read my paper aloud, and this helped me catch simple grammar and word choice mistakes, as well as some sentence structure issues. While I read my lengthy essay, my Writing Fellow took notes on how I could improve my essay. She gave me pointers on how to enhance my transitions as well as create a better flow from paragraph to paragraph. The last thing that my Writing Fellow and I worked on was my conclusion paragraph. I was having some issues with the organization and content of this final paragraph. She helped me summarize my ideas and add more of the "interpretation" and "judge" concepts that we had worked on in class. She also gave me a little confidence...
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Strengths as a Writer

My strengths as a writer are more so in analyzing a work than in creating something from scratch. In the poetry unit, as well as in the Literary Analysis, we were tasked with writing claims. I think that my skills in analyzing the language and rhetorical situation of a piece of work aided me in writing many of these claims. In the Literary Analysis, we wrote claims in the form of points that supported our thesis. These were more of explanatory tools, but analyzation was still involved throughout this particular writing process. In the poetry unit, writing claims drew significantly upon the rhetorical situation and language of a poem.  Analyzation also applies to determining the meaning of a piece of literature in its entirety. This can be difficult for some people because it demands thinking about the many aspects of a work; however, I believe that determining a central theme is one of my strengths. During our novel study of Purple Hibiscus, I was able to follow the storyline effor...
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Areas for Improvement

In addition to my strengths, I also faced many challenges throughout the year. Some of these being writing over extended periods of time, sentence fluency, and organizing my writing. When writing over extended periods of time, I would often come to points where I was at a loss for words and or ideas. Blogging has helped me to fix this issue, however, I still sometimes suffer from this occasional "Writer's Block," most often when I am working on formal essays. In order to get over this issue, I switch to another task and then come back to my paper, which generally helps. Another personal challenge that I faced this year was with sentence fluency. When proof-reading my essays, I would come across sentences that were not as smooth as they should be. As the year has passed, I have become better at adding transitions and making my writing have a more fluid rhythm. A major challenge for me this year was in organizing my writing. In the beginning of the year I struggled to struc...
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