Friday, January 10, 2020

Dylan's Academic Writing Self-Assessment

   When it comes to writing eloquent and persuasive essays, there's still a lot I have to improve on. A majority of the time, I can have good analysis of a piece, but as I start writing the essay, I find I have trouble balancing the various points in my essay.
   An example can be found in an essay I wrote during the previous semester in my ENGL 251 class on Nathanial Hawthorne's short story, "Young Goodman Brown." I found I had insightful analysis of the essay, in particular with a reader-response approach of the text. When writing the actual essay, it was difficult for me to maintain a good balance between analysis and summary. I tended to spend too much time explaining the context of a certain scene and not enough time explaining the effect certain literary choices had on the audience and how it accomplished that.

4 comments:

  1. I think I have the opposite problem from you! I feel like once I have the analysis I'm usually find at balancing my points but it takes me six million years to analyze pieces fully.

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  3. Whoops, I deleted my last comment. I need to stop using Safari. Anyways, I'm the same as Savannah. It takes a good bit for me to really analyze an essay and apply it to my own work.

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  4. It's definitely hard to not over-summarize in papers, especially if context is necessary for your argument!! But that's awesome that you're good at analysis!

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