Sophie's Writing Self-Assessment

I think that my writing has developed quite positively over the course of this semester. I felt that the biggest help was the way we really got into our topics through deadlines that forced us to draft at least a couple times. I usually don’t go through a paper so many times, and by sticking with the same topic for my final paper as with Lit Analysis 2, I was able to really dig deep into both my topic and my writing. I think that the fact that I had already come up with my idea/thesis in the second paper made my writing of the final paper a lot more enjoyable since my least favorite part of writing a paper is coming up with the idea. I have learned that once I really narrow in on a topic, I actually enjoy the research that comes along with it, and I like to prove my point in a paper. I also liked the specificity I was able to employ when it came to earlier papers, like the “Ozymandias” paper. I got better at digging into the formalist aspects of text while also keeping in mind general characteristics, like genre.

It’s funny looking back at my initial self-assessment: I wrote that my biggest weakness was coming up with ideas, and I said the same thing in the previous paragraph without even realizing. I guess I’m still not loving the beginning process of writing a paper, but I learned some good techniques through this class. For example, I found the inspiration for my final paper through blogs and other informal media sources. I have learned that this is a great way to generate ideas, even for scholarly research. In the future, I will make sure to search through non-scholarly sources in order to find inspiration for papers that I’m trying to write. I also think that I have improved in staying focused on a claim, especially in doing so in a longer research paper.

This class has really taught me how to dive into English research. Because my major is actually Political Science and English is one of my minors, I am a lot more experienced with conducting political science-related research. But, I have found that there are many helpful databases and resources to aid in research related to literature. Through my final paper topic on the environment and climate change, I discovered that I can use literature to learn about things that I am passionate about through a different lens than I would through other disciplines. For example, if I was researching the environment through political science, I would probably find a ton of resources about partisan policies and the international struggle to alleviate climate change. Yet, by researching the environment through the lens of The Handmaid’s Tale, I was able to learn more about the topic in the less-partisan context of literature, in a way that reflects the possible future of the Earth.