Savannah's Writing Self-Assessments

This past semester, I feel like I have grown in a unique way in my writing.  This class has truly taught me so much about the process of writing. I feel like we didn’t focus as much on the grammatical, more editing, sides of the writing process which I truly appreciated as I feel like that’s something we should all know by now. I also think that the editing process is the less important side of the writing process, and this class focused more on the topics and analysis in your writing. I loved how we were able to chose our books and topics which allowed me to cultivate more creativity in my writing for the first time. Nothing was very forced, which made it so much easier to enjoy the writing process.

I believe this is why I enjoyed the final paper as much as I did. I loved how we were encouraged at first to just explore topics in obscure places like discussion boards, Pinterest, and google images. I felt like because of this instead of choosing topics that I thought would be the easiest and fastest to write about, I was writing about things that I genuinely was interested in researching and  learning about. 

I do feel like I still procrastinated writing my  final essay for way too long, but it also was a very busy time of life for me. I did stretch out the writing process for longer than normal which was stress relieving when I still procrastinated finishing off my essays. I felt like for the first time I was truly emotionally attached to my topic and was invested in proving my thesis. I feel like it makes your paper more interesting to other people when they can see how important it is to you and how passionate you are about it.

I still wish I had created more time for myself to  go through rough drafts and edit and proofread my final literary essay, so this is something I would like to improve upon in my future essays. I feel like this class taught me a lot more about including various literary theories in my writing which I hadn’t done before in other classes. I feel like being social in my writing helped me some, but not a ton because we all had different topics. I think because of this variety in topics it made it difficult to give good advice on other people’s topics when I wasn’t really very educated on them. I do think it helped sometimes to say out loud what I was writing about because it forced me to really know what I was at least considering writing about.  I feel like using the non-scholarly resources was very helpful for the first few parts of writing because it gave me a lot of background research and got my mind thinking on different topics, but past that I think it may have been somewhat distracting because when I was feeling lazy it was easier to find non-scholarly resources and use those in my paper.