Dylan's Writing Self Assessment

In this class, one of the most important things that I have learned, in my opinion, is the ability to properly plan out and write an essay. For me, this means setting apart a certain window of time for me to write and then just writing. Too often I spend way more time than I need to working on my rough draft. In this class I learned how to simply write and worry about fixing all of the little things afterward. I honestly believe that this has not only helped me write faster, but better as I left behind my worries about what was on the paper at the beginning of the process and instead just writing at first.
In my research process, I've enjoyed learning so much more about how to do research well. Before this class, my research was mostly just searching through the main database and choosing what looked good. Not only have I learned how to find sources more efficiently, but I've learned what sources are actually valuable sources for my research. Just gaining that useful knowledge has been fun for me and I know that makes me sound like a nerd, but I made it to college somehow.
Looking back on where I was at the beginning of the semester, I've already improved greatly at my skill to write rough drafts and research more effectively. Even just my skill at writing has improved overall just from writing so much. I still need to work on my ability to stay on task in a longer paper though. For example in a long paper I have a tendency to go off on tangents in order to fill in all of the space that I need to fill in. I could see myself doing this in my last paper as well. Even when I recognize it, I still struggle because I can't tell when I am going off on a tangent or just expanding on my argument. I have gotten better at balancing context and analysis though.
Through the semester, I have really enjoyed some of the aspects of our social writing process. Sharing my rough draft has been extremely helpful in my writing process and has made sure that my final drafts actually sound like final drafts. Mostly the rest of the social writing processes have helped me stay on schedule with the essays. It was difficult sometimes to benefit from looking at other people's processes because oftentimes we all approached things very differently. Although I still learned things through this, in my opinion it wasn't very significant. With online or informal sources I found it very difficult to use this in my essays. I could use them, a lot of times with a lot of effort, as a jumping point for other more formal research or topics, but for me it was very difficult to use them for brainstorming.