Writing Reflection

This year my writing has improved by a lot through all of our writing tips and from the amount of writing we completed. The writing tips have had the greatest impact on my writing skills and it has been completely transformed because of them. I became much more aware of repeating words, making meaning early and especially watching my -ings. I went from "Gatsby is always thinking he can get there" from my Great Gatsby essay, to "At my internship I worked with the lead researchers to help" in my Ampersand article. I also improved on eliminating sledgehammer words. Adding "always" was routine for me until this year when I realized how overbearing it is. In one of my earlier honors literature writings for the novel Beloved, I wrote "What you do, and what conflicts you get in will always have an effect on the people around you" But now, I avoid always because there is a more concise way to convey "always" I worked particularly hard to use the writing tips on my media saves the beach calendar captions since I had such limited space to convey a lot of important information.

I benefited from all of the various critique sessions we did, and especially the ones where we went through editing just writing kips. Going through so many drafts was very important to me, since I received valuable feedback from my peers or Randy. My writing skills grew not only from the feedback I received, but also because I would constantly knit-pick at other peoples writing. When writing Ampersand, I read through so many different articles and the edits I made caused me to go back at take a second look at my own writing. I edited a part of my article to have a simile-"The machine startled me with beeping and loud noises just like a computer scanner." after helping another student fix a simile in their article. Even feedback after the fact, like with my honors essays was helpful because it taught me a lesson for next time. I took the feedback "too much potential, not enough depth & analysis" from my Civil War essay where I wrote "General Sherman had a point when he refused to retreat from Atlanta. He wasn’t trying to terrorize the people, he was trying to erase everything and give the South a fresh start to benefit the generations to come." to deeper analysis in my Ampersand article- "All of the paperwork was laid out with immense detail and in a step by step process. One step includes having thing project you on working be reviewed by an institutional review board to ensure that the project matches the universities policies and regulations."

For my future writing, I want to continue to use the writing tips, write engaging essays and articles, and develop my vocabulary to make my pieces sound more professional. Specifically, my goal is to write professional engaging essays and pieces of writing. I think that some of my earlier honors essays were some of the first steps to getting to my goal, and Ive only gone up from there. My Ampersand article is an example of me getting closer to my goal, but there is always room for improvement. For my honors presidential endorsement, I created my piece by looking at professional examples, and this has been a method for me to create my idea of professional writing since I wrote a satirical essay my sophomore year. Im going to take all of the progress I have made and strategies I have learned this year and continue to apply them next year to achieve my goal through writing a lot more, and learning along the way.