Magda's Writing Self-Assessment

Looking back at my first writing self-assessment, I think that I still have a tendency to ramble, but I have gotten more careful about repetition within that rambling. I have made a concentrated effort to use my words wisely, and I find myself now cutting out entire paragraphs that have nothing to do with what I'm talking about, which is something I was much too scared to do before. I would still like to do better, though, about using less words in general to convey what I want to say. I think I have also gotten better at actually analyzing within my essays, because I tend to want to write persuasively, but by my final essay I think I did a good job of analyzing character and genre. I learned to use analysis to prove a point about the story instead of just evidence in the text to prove a point about some bigger philosophical question (which is what I am often tempted to do).

Something that has been really enlightening during this semester is the idea of social research. I've always known that I do better on papers when I'm able to talk my ideas out with someone close to me, but I have never before considered it as a research approach. Making an effort to throw around ideas and talk through my thesis before putting a proper idea down on paper has been incredibly helpful and has also turned homework assignments into something that I was actually excited to write about. I was able to find ideas that I actually believed in and topics that actually interested me, and that made writing about them a lot more enjoyable. It has also helped me to know where to begin in the writing process. Usually I get stuck in the beginning of writing an essay, but just taking time to talk out my ideas that are not quite organized gave me an easy and stress-free way to start organizing my ideas. By the time I was done talking about my ideas, I usually had enough of a direction that I wanted to go in that I could start researching and outlining my paper.

I also became a lot better at researching as a result of first doing social research. Instead of spending time mindlessly searching the internet for ideas, by the end of social research I already had an idea I wanted to run with, so it made it simpler to find sources that would help me write about my idea. I also really enjoyed finding media sources to help me talk about a more contemporary work in my last paper. It was something that I had never really tackled before, so it seemed a little new to me while working on my second paper, but I was able to find a lot for my final paper, and I found ways to integrate them really well. Finding and using media sources taught me that writing literary criticism doesn't have to be constricted to a classroom setting, but it's a thing that people write in the real world, and one need not constrain themselves to using only one kind of source when we have so many available to us in this day and age.