James' Writing Self-Assessment

As I went back through the papers I’ve written throughout this semester, I can see the improvement I’ve made as a writer. Looking back at my initial self-evaluation post, I said, “One of my weaknesses in academic writing is my tendency to ramble. I am not very good at outlining. Because of this, my papers often end up scatterbrained and difficult to follow.” I’ve made a lot of progress in regards to what I originally considered a weakness. What helped me with this was the format of the papers we wrote. The majority of the papers we wrote—and especially the final paper—required a lot of pre-writing because we had to pull in ideas from so many different sources. I could have pretty easily written a 3000 word essay on Frankenstein just using the text and the ideas already in my head. But in addition to that, I had to pull in ideas from two informal sources, two general sources, four scholarly sources, and feedback from my teacher and classmates. The result was a bit of a Frankenstein—pun intended. It was a hodgepodge of ideas from all sorts of different places, and it was really difficult to get them to blend together without feeling like a disjointed collage. But the fact that it was hard was really good for me. The end result was that I had to do a lot more prewriting—a lot more brainstorming, research, and outlining—to get it to work. Whether it did work is up to the reader of my paper, but it was a good exercise. The average amount of time I spent prewriting per paper in this class far exceeded the prewriting I’ve done in previous classes, and I hope that the result is that my papers were more organized, more cohesive, and less rambly than usual.

The one thing I can’t honestly say I enjoyed about this class was the social writing aspect. I don’t really like interacting with other human beings. I suppose that sounds kind of mean, but at least it’s honest. Having struggled with social anxiety for most of my life, I like to do my writing on my own.

Looking forward, however, I definitely learned some things about my own writing process that I intend to employ in the future. I have learned the value of outlining. I think my essays in the past tended to be rambly because I kind of discovered what I was trying to argue as I wrote. The more I wrote, the more my own ideas became clear to me. But now, I’ve learned how to outline better. It takes a lot of time—which is why I didn’t do it before. However, it saves a lot of time in the editing process later on to have a clear, distinct idea of what I’m trying to argue before I start writing. I intend to use the more extensive outlining habits I developed in this class in my future academic writing.