My Writing Flaws

Throughout the Mid-SEE I have written reflections on my writing and participated in group activities. I have received comments back from my peers and suggestions to help with revising my paper. With the help of my professor, Professor Church and my classmates, I was able to comprehend their suggestions to me to make my essay better and by revising my classmate’s essays, I was able to point out mistakes that I might have made in my essay, which made myself go back to my essay and check and see if I had mistakes that just flew by my eyes.

The two errors that present the biggest challenge to me in writing are comma splice and unnecessary commas. All throughout high school and into college these two errors have been my biggest downfall. In Fall 2014 semester, I took English 111 and my teacher had written on every paper that I wrote that I have to be careful of both comma splice and unnecessary commas. I can use this class as an opportunity to correct these errors by referring back to this book. In my other class, we didn’t use a book so I never had something to help me understand what exactly I was doing wrong. I hope that with help from my classmates and my teacher I can overcome this obstacle I face in my writing. In addition, I plan to use the book to help me when I am uncertain

I think self-reflection, or a careful cogitation of one’s personal work, is very important. It will help me think about my strengths and weaknesses in my writing skills and learning process, so that I can improve my weaknesses in the future and become a better writer. I believe, I have many strengths and many weaknesses that can be seen transparently through my drafts, revisions, and final essays, or writings, this semester. My overall strength includes the ability to pick out good examples from articles and the ability to construct good development of my body paragraphs after my revisions. On the other hand, my overall weakness includes having some unclear explanation of thoughts, unclear topic sentences, confusing thesis statements, having undefined terms, difficulties transitioning from one idea to another. I have learned that to have a good essay, I must revise my papers more than once because there are always flaws that can be fixed or improved. My writing process has evolved from having difficulties writing down or explaining my thought process to being able to explain and clarify examples to help support my thesis statement.

Choose three errors that you regularly make in your writing and include a plan on how you will avoid making the same errors in the future?

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.

Errors in writing are bound to happen, but many of mine have to do with high order concerns rather than sentence-level errors. However, that does not mean that I do not make sentence-level errors. I tend to struggle with the use of commas and semicolons within sentences. Although you haven’t identified this as a problem in my previous essays, whenever I read over my writing I tend to spend minutes analyzing my sentence to decide whether or not a comma needs to be added or removed. I also find myself writing sentence fragments without even noticing. In order to catch these mistakes I have to read over my paper multiple times aloud, and also have a peer do the same. Reviewing my writing and sentences not only as I write, but also at the end

The second one of my major strengths I have and use in my writings is my use of commas. This is another one of my strengths because when I use commas correctly it adds dimension to my writings and makes them easier to read. Adding commas to my writings is very important because sometimes I write longer sentences and if there are no commas it would not make a lot of sense. One of my writings that reflects my comma use is my To Kill a Mockingbird exam essay. “It can cause people to see the world in different ways, including hatred, and is also used for people to express their feelings.”(1). This example is a great showcase of my comma use and If this sentence did not have commas it would read unnatural.

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

I have a lot more weaknesses than strengths when it comes to my writing. One of my weaknesses is that I have a difficult time coming up with something to say regarding the subject that I am writing about. If you want me to write about a topic or issue, I can easily do it in one paragraph. It is hard for me to elaborate and expand my ideas. I don’t ever “take it to the next level” because I am not sure how to do such a thing without getting off topic. Another weakness is that I am not very skilled at writing argumentative essays- especially when they have to be presented. The whole time I am writing I am afraid I’m going to offend someone or make someone mad at me for what I said or what my views are.

When I first got into English this year, i thought i was already great at writing and i did not know how i could possibly improve. I was completely wrong. This is not at all a bad thing. I was in for quite a rude awakening. I was very mad at the time about how hard things were and how complicated they were getting so very fast, but now i know that that was all worth it. Just looking back at how bad the weekly paragraph i revised was, was proof how much i have improved since then. My word choice is much better now, which you can see in the local revision, and my overall structure is better now. I learned that you can not just throw a bunch of ideas and thoughts into one paragraph. You need explanation and set up to emphasize ideas. After looking

Have you ever cleaned out your closet and found many items you never knew you owned? That is the way English 101 felt to me. I learned important skills and techniques that I will maintain even though the course is over. I will be constantly improving what I have learned—meaning I will work to carry about my strengths and eliminate my remaining weaknesses. English 101 has helped me grow as a reader, a writer, and most importantly a person.

Writing papers and essays has always been something that I have struggled with. Throughout high school, I did fairly well on essays and research papers, but writing at a college level has proven to be very difficult for me. I feel that I have never been able to succeed in writing in the way that I had hoped and envisioned I would. When I get an essay assignment, it is easy for me to think of what I want to write my paper on. But when it comes down to actually writing the essay, I always struggle with either grammar or getting the main point across to the reader. These two issues have been difficult for me to overcome, no matter how much teaching I get or revising I do. However, throughout the semester I think that the feedback from

For my Personal Essay, I made many revisions to my mistakes. The biggest mistake, was not having the paragraphs in chronological order. This made the reader extremely confused on how things happened in order. So, I changed the paragraphs around as well as my thesis statement. After I did that, the clarity and organization improved tremendously throughout the paper. I noticed that I had a lot of incomplete sentences missing the who of what was happening, so I added those. I seem to have issues on where to place commas correctly. If I study proper punctuation it will help my growth as a writer. My sentence structure is a bit confusing at times so rearranging words is the best solution to that. When sharing an intense experience, my mind goes faster than my fingers type and words end up missing so having multiple proofreaders is efficient for catching those mistakes. By paying attention to all these errors, I will flourish in my writing skills.

I believe that my writing has grown a lot with in this first semester of college. I was the type of person in college that would write a paper, and not review it, and still turn it in. I would usually receive good grades, but that was on the high school level. Those types of under-developed papers do not receive good grades in college. On a paper that I may have turned in to one of my high school teachers would have got me a B, yet if I turn around and use that same paper now, I would receive no more than a D. That is what I believe should happen at this level in the game. You as an individual must recognize your own mistakes, and correct them on your own. In high school many of my teacher’s would grade a

Everyone has a weakness when it comes to writing. Unlucky for me I have three major weaknesses; procrastination, grammar, and punctuation. I can assure whoever reads this will find at least 5 punctuation and grammar errors due to my procrastination. No doubt everyone messes up at some point in their writing, but I have a special bond with error. With Comp came a couple of “tools”, we got the learn how to edit our essays backward with different errors to focus on; one being complete sentences. My sentences have become better when it