Annie's Writing Self-Assessment

My favorite part of writing my final paper was bringing various sources together and seeing how they relate to each other. It was really fun to pull from many different places, and I just enjoyed watching how my sources came together in my final paper.

Looking back on my initial self-assessment I feel like I’ve come to look forward to and appreciate editing and revision which is a big turnaround for me from the beginning of semester. I’ve learn to take these steps more seriously and utilize them in my writing process. I a lot more time for this now when I am composing a paper.

I think where I would like to improve is more quickly working my way through writer’s block. Meaning if I can’t find the right path to follow with my essay from the start, it can take a long time to get going and to bring things together cohesively. I’ve learned some strategies from this class about getting around that which have been helpful, but I feel like at times I get in my own way. I heard this quote recently that talks about how in a good story, you get out of the way and let it tell itself, and I think to some extent this can be applied to academic writing. I love outlining but sometimes I just struggle in the transfer. In the future, after I’ve done my planning, I want to focus on just getting out of my own way and writing. If I get stuck somewhere I want to be able to just more quickly move forward and work around it.

I feel like this semester has helped me deep dive into the researching process. I have a lot more avenues, a lot more tools in my belt, for finding sources and doing good research. I think it was very helpful learning to incorporate informal sources into our research. Especially for well-known pieces of literature I feel that informal sources are important to take into account. Since a lot of my papers were based on a more obscure work, it was hard to find a lot of variety in informal sources but using this avenue helped to me to find some paintings that helped me a lot in my papers. There are some other things that I’ve come to discover are really important in my writing process. One of these is to outline my ideas specifically with pen and paper, doing this seems to just make things click for me and helps me to be more cohesive in my writing. I also have been converted to reading my papers out loud during the editing and revision process. Reading out loud and also talking things out as I was writing my papers helped me to find clarity in my writing. Also during this semester, I realized how much I enjoyed writing personal essays and I would like to use this mode again in the future. Going forward I plan on using these new habits in my future writing.