Rowen's Writing Self-Assessment

Looking at my initial self-assessment, I personally feel like I didn't improve that much. It's hard to tell though, given the amount of writing we've done in this class. I wanted to become more efficient in my writing, and to an extent I think I did accomplish that, but not in the way I expected. I wanted to learn to effectively communicate ideas without being to flowery, but I think the way I improved the most throughout this semester was generating specific ideas that were easier to communicate efficiently.

I am very detail-oriented when it comes to writing, so much so in fact that I often get lost in those details. I spend way too much introducing topics and concepts that don't matter and aren't necessarily relevant to what I'm talking about. Since I developed a habit early on of developing a thesis based on research, rather than the other way around, my thesis development reflected the research I was doing. I learned a lot of really interesting, valuable things, but often I think my papers were more explorations of the things I learned than actual analysis. As such, they were often large, unwieldy things that didn't really go anywhere valuable. The lack of payoff  I think contributed to how wordy they seemed. It seems funny to me now because in my original self-assessment I said "While I am confident in my ability to arrange ideas on a macro level . . . I am less confident in my ability to arrange those individual pieces" it seems like what I was struggling with was actual what I was confident in- my details were often fine, but they didn't lead me anywhere, and since they didn't lead me anywhere, they felt fluffy and useless.

Professor Burton helped me to understand better the ways in which my theses were lacking in our individual meetings. At each meeting we held, he pointed out the ways in which I introduced concepts didn't necessarily communicate what I wanted them to, and therefore made the rest of the paper quite confusing. In the last paper, I made a concerted effort to create a focused and clear introduction and thesis, which I think is what enabled me to write the rest of the paper. Writing it the first time was insanely difficult; each sentence felt like I was pulling teeth to even get an idea onto the document, and it never felt right or good enough. Having a clear direction and a solid body of research to back me up really helped in this regard.

Regarding informal sources, I have very mixed feelings. I think one of the things that inhibited my ability to talk about my text in our penultimate paper was the reliance on informal sources. Since there wasn't a lot said on my text, and what little was said about the genre as well as the text didn't really add anything new or interesting to the discussion (the conversation about AI has kind of been done to death), informal sources didn't really add very much. They were much more helpful in the final paper. Even though I didn't use all of them, seeing how community opinions and thoughts reflected or conflicted with concepts in the research was really interesting.