DSP Reflection

My Writing

Throughout my schooling experience I felt that I have struggled with writing.  Writing was always very difficult for me and felt like an unnatural and awful chore.  Through the assignment of the placement essay and follow-up question guide given to me in class I feel as though I have found ways to improve my writing.  Through this question guide and assessment of my essay I have been able to pinpoint my weaknesses to two main areas; my intro and closing paragraphs which can help make my writing more cohesive and understandable along with improving the overall clarity and transfer of my thoughts to the essay.  By being forced to sit down and actively look at my essay which these questions I was able to discover these weakness.  The first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have the problem so being forced to go over my writing with these questions led me to discover my weakness in writing which I can now improve upon to make myself a better writer.  My goal in this class is to improve my ability to write clearly and create more effective openings and closing paragraphs in my writing.  Now that I have found my weaknesses I can improve upon them through this writing 100 course.
 
Some challenges I faced with the placement essay were putting my thoughts into a cohesive and comprehensible essay along with starting and closing paragraphs.  To combat these issues I did a kind of guess and check system rewriting the opening and closing of my essay that didn’t seem to flow or that I thought could be better.  This system isn’t really very effective and I think once I figure out what clear and cohesive writing is I will be able to create informative and effective opening and closing paragraphs in my essay much easier.  After this, when I felt as though all parts of my essay were clear and concise, I had a peer edit done on my paper.  With another person’s opinion behind my writing I felt much more confident in my work.  At the University of Michigan I can easily ask my professor or the even more accessible, but still viable Sweetland Writing Center to proofread my paper and help me put on the last touches to create a good finished product I can be confident in.  My weaknesses that became apparent with this assignment were getting the ideas from my head into a cohesive essay that would make sense to my readers and crafting effective opening and closing paragraphs. Once I figure out what I want to say I struggle to transfer all of my thoughts and ideas from my head into a logical and intelligible essay.  I think this weakness can possibly be combated by doing an outline of my paper so I can lay out all of my ideas and organize them before I write.  Ineffective and weak opening and closing paragraphs greatly take away from the ideas I presented in my paper.  My conclusion in my DSP was essentially my opening paragraph just reworded and reorganized.  This isn’t very effective as the introduction paragraph is supposed to introduce the topic and the conclusion is supposed to tell the reader what to take away.  I try to fulfill the roles of opening and closing paragraphs in my essays, but I never really got the hang of it which is why I want to improve upon it this semester.  By identifying and assessing my weaknesses with writing I hope to be able to target and improve upon them in the writing 100 course.
   
         I feel as though my greatest strength or success in writing this paper was absorbing what I read in the article and formulating a clear and thoughtful response to the question that was posed.  For example, in the DSP essay I immediately knew I was going to support high school sports and was able to form effective arguments for my point pretty early on without too much thought.  Through some of my AP history and literature courses I have gained a lot of confidence in experience of questions that involve reading or documents.  I feel like I can quickly read and derive an opinion or meaning from readings.  When I was younger my parents would always read to me and I would read a lot for fun.  I feel like reading has helped my vocabulary which I consider a strength, along with my reading skills and comprehension.
        I usually start writing a paper is simply that; I just jump into writing.  This style seems to work alright for me, but I wonder if gathering my thoughts into a clear and concise outline would better help me create a more comprehensible and free-flowing essay.  In the future I think I will look a little more into the “outline” approach to writing papers.  I think that getting all my ideas into a concise and organized outline could aid in my paper’s flow and information.  I feel this because if I brainstorm first and write everything down I won’t lose any ideas before I get to them in my paper and I will organize everything on the outline in the order that it makes sense in my paper, not just type ideas in any order whenever they come to me.  I also try to finish huge chunks of a paper at the same time instead of doing small sections one by one.  I feel like this helps me because all my ideas are contained in a block of time so I don’t forget anything I really wanted to say during a break from writing.  I did the placement essay in two sittings as to better contain my thoughts and I think that strategy really worked for me.  I think after reflecting that my new essay strategy will be to make an outline for my essay and then finish it in a few sittings.  This combines my old methods with some new ideas and I think it will be the most effective method for me to improve my writing and my papers.
     
       Throughout writing the placement essay my thoughts or opinions about the assignment never really changed because I took an adamant stance from the second I read the article and stuck to it.  I completely disagreed with Amanda’s seemingly ludicrous opinion from first reading the prompt through the completion of my essay.  I think I usually take a strong stance during my writing because I’m very confident in my ability to reason and extract information from a passage, which I feel helps me because I can focus solely on my writing and not constantly debate with myself if I took the right stance and try to change my essay and ideas half way through.
The difficult part about a paper is you never truly feel that it is completed.  With math and science problems you know when you have come to your final answer.  With multiple choice questions when you’re finished it’s pretty clear, but with writing you never really feel like your paper is completely one hundred percent finished.  You can always add more, clarify something or reword something, or change this or that tiny aspect of your work.  You can always find another friend, teacher, or classmate to check your work and further critique it.  This is one aspect of writing that I think is very difficult to deal with, so when I finally turn in my paper I’m very relieved.  I think I can help combat this problem through meetings with my professor and taking my essays to the Sweetland Writing Center so I know I have top tier individuals checking and critiquing my work.
 
         Now that I know my weaknesses in writing are cohesion and clarity of my thoughts along with the transition from thought to thought I can improve upon them this semester to fully reap the rewards of the writing 100 course.  This will help me to more clearly express my thoughts and ideas through the written word which is a very important skill being stressed in the American education system today.  With the skills I hope to improve upon in this course I can go back to my placement essay and fix various transitions and other problems to make my points and arguments much better just by clarifying them and making them more understandable to any potential readers.

         Through the question guide and my self-assessment of my placement essay I was able to find my writing weakness which are writing transitions between ideas at the beginning and end of paragraphs and getting my ideas clearly and concisely from my head into words.  Along with my weakness I was able to assess my whole writing process.  I have found that by combining my past writing strategy of writing in large chunks with the new process of making an outline I will be able to improve the clarity and flow of my essays while still keeping all my ideas together and contained.  I took the writing 100 class because I did not think I was one hundred percent confident and ready for the college level writing that would be expected of me.  When I first registered for the writing one hundred class I didn’t really know how it was going to help me.  I don’t think I really knew what was wrong with my writing and why I lacked confidence in my writing.  Now that I know my weakness I feel like they will be easier to target and improve upon before I begin higher level college writing.  Not only will improving this semester in writing one hundred help my technical writing skills, but it will help me gain confidence in my writing which may be just as important.  There are many sayings about confidence in sports such as “You miss every shot you don’t take” and “How can you hit a ball if you’re thinking about all the ways you can miss” I feel like these apply to school work as well because you need to have confidence especially in your writing to do well and achieve what you want to.  I feel like this whole process thus far has been very beneficial for my writing and has been a good choice so far.  I hope to continue the process of improving my technical writing skills and my confidence in writing to become a better writer, student, and person for my future.  With this clear goal in mind I feel like I can improve my writing this semester and be better prepared for my future writing in college and in life.