My Strengths In Reflective Writing

Most of the time when someone is told to write a paper, they read the directions and follow the prompt. But when told to think about strengths and weaknesses of how they actually write those papers, it is a good eye opener to realize what needs to be improved and what is already superior quality. For my writing, being a perfectionist is in many ways a strength, but it can also be a weakness. My perfectionism affects all of my other strengths and weaknesses in my writing.

As a recent high school graduate I may seem to have many more weaknesses than strengths. But, when brainstorming for ideas to write about I noticed that I had many more strengths than weaknesses, the complete opposite. My strengths allow me to stand out and allow my audience to experience my writing in a positive way. I am very persuasive and can demonstrate to others the way I believe and how I feel about a topic so they can recognize the way I view a certain topic. By being persuasive it is important to show ones opinions and

The past two semesters were great experiences. Within this past school year my knowledge as a reader and writer has improved. It felt like it was just yesterday, when I had a lot of difficulty writing and poor reading strategies. Now, as I said before, I am an improved writer and reader. The assignments and class activities over the two semesters were great benefits to me, and helped me make progress towards the first year learning goals.

I’ve always struggled with trying to stay focused on my school work. While it may not look like it on the outside, it is a constant struggle in the inside. My mind is like a jungle gym with a bunch of kids zooming around. Sometimes I would just stare at the screen of my computer hoping the words would just appear themselves, but if that ever happened I probably wouldn’t even be here. My brain has these switches in them to tell me to do something else like play a game on your tablet or watch Netflix right when I am writing my essay. It’s how my brain works, and there never seems to be a manual switch because it’s automatic. My lack of focus caused me to face many obstacles, but through my weaknesses I discovered some of my greatest

Over the course of this semester, my confidence in writing has improved greatly. In high school, I didn’t really know how to write effectively. I wasn’t really sure what was considered to be “good writing” until I took AP* English. However, even while I was taking this “Advanced Placement” class, I was still trying to figure out how to really create “good writing”. I feel as if this had something to do with the fact that I never really had to work with the rules of grammar intensively. After taking this course, however, I now have a much better understanding of how to correctly use proper grammar. I also improved on using transitional phrases in my writing. I have implemented my understanding of proper grammar and transitional phrases in both my writing inside and outside of this class as a result.

My strong points as a reader have also definitely improved after reading the poems and stories we experienced this semester. Writing has been an important form of expression for me. I find myself to be very soft spoken and speaking verbally is usually difficult for me because I can’t always seem to find the right words to say. I feel that I am more expressive and have more control over what I want to say. While this semester progressed toward its end, I have learned new writing skills and gradually learned how to engage with audiences. This skill was very useful in meeting my course goals in English 102.

The best way to get better at something is to practice and have peers critique your style and fundamentals. As a student, I have my professor and my fellow peers to proofread and critique my writing. With these corrections I have learned I have many new strengths and weaknesses in my writing since before I started school at COTC. I have also been given many different types of resources to help improve my writing.

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

Writing was never a known weakness of mine. However, I could never confidently call it a strength. Throughout the course of this semester, my writing style has evolved and I have rid my writing of many habitual mistakes. I have learned to appreciate writing much more, and enjoy the moments where my mind meets words on a paper. Creativity has always been one of my strong suits, but through this course I catered my creativity to compose a variety of essays and speeches. Likewise, public speaking is something that I did not struggle with in the past, yet the structure of the class required a video speeches which was fairly new to me. All in all, I have been able to identify and modify gaps in my composition of writing and speech as a result of this course.

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.

My writing skills which I have worked on over the few months I have been in English 102 have changed quite a bit in my opinion. There are many things which I have improved upon that were amongst my weaker writing skills when the year began. On the opposite side of that point, there are also many things which I still need to improve upon if I want to truly elevate my writing to a level that I will be confident in. Finally, I have gained new skills outside of writing from this class, particularly the activities which we did in class at various points throughout the year. These things all cumulate together to give me an appreciation of English courses which I did not previously have.

During the semester, I learned to focus on my strengths and work on my weaknesses. I could use my organization, paragraph structure, and transition skills to keep high quality writing. This will be helpful to assure an above average grade when I take English 102 during the summer. On the other hand, although students often try to avoid their weaknesses, I see them as useful. Knowing my weaknesses gives me the opportunity to work on them until they become strengths. For example, as I mentioned before, organization is presently my biggest strength. However, at the beginning of the course, it wasn’t. I had to practice and work on it until it became natural and

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.

In my writing, I have many strengths, some that which I have developed through this course and some that I already had. Before this

Over the course of the semester, there has been numerous amount of areas where I believe I have improved in comparison to high school. What has helped me in my writing is the writing class and the in-class writing workshop. The writing class that is located in the Kremen education building has helped me with my writing greatly because in the writing center the person in charge teach us lenses and we apply those lenses to the writing, draft, or reading that someone brings in. The in-class writing workshop has helped me because other students get to read my writing. This is helpful because I get feedback from many students and they let me know what needs to be fixed. A new tool I have been using is They Say I Say. The book is very helpful because of the information and examples it provides such as the templates. I have been applying the templates into my essays and I have seen a significant difference.