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.

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.

Jaidyn's Writing Self-Assessment

In my original academic writing self-evaluation, I wrote that my least favorite part of research papers is doing the actual research. I have to say (and I’m not making this up for the sake of this post) that researching for the final paper actually wasn’t horrible. The resources that Dr. Burton and Robert Means shared with us really helped me feel comfortable doing research. I didn’t get overwhelmed by information, and I was able to look at a variety of sources– newspapers, articles, and ebooks. 

I feel like the idea for my paper started as a tiny seed and grew as I actually found sources. With that said, I’m not sure if this was the best way to formulate my claim. If I had had a definite idea of exactly what I wanted to say from the beginning, my research would have been more focused and efficient. Of course, because the research process is not necessarily independent of the drafting process, I was still continuing to find sources even while I wrote. In the future, I’ll practice developing a powerful claim early on so that I have a clearer idea about what supporting information I’ll need.

One thing I wish I had been able to do better was find the proper balance between sources and my own commentary. I hate feeling like my writing is just an amalgamation of other people’s ideas, connected by a few words of my own. On the other hand, sometimes I worry that if I don’t have enough support, my papers won’t be credible or mature. I’m still working on finding a good middle ground. I think maybe if I made formal analysis a bigger part of my writing, I would feel more like a valid contributor to my own work.

Being social with the writing process did help me, especially because I am inclined to be very private about the things I write. The peer critiques we did were nice, because sometimes I view my writing like my child– I don’t want to recognize its flaws, and need someone else to do it for me. I wish that I had been more social with my research– to be honest, when I came home a few weeks ago, a lot of my motivation drained away. However, I know that I’ll be doing a lot of writing in the future, and I plan to use social research as a means to gather and test ideas. 

I loved that I could use informal online sources for my writing in this class. When I was a kid learning how to write reports, I would google random websites to use for my “research,” but by the time I got to college I realized that googling doesn’t often give you valid sources. However, it’s been really cool to learn how to properly use informal sources so that they enrich my writing instead of cheapening it.

Overall, I feel like this final paper taught me a lot about the writing process. Regardless of how well it actually turned out, I’ve learned enough skills to be certain that next time I have to do a similar project, my claim will be stronger, my research more relevant, and my socialization more impactful.  

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.

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. 

Kayla's Writing Self-Assessment

My writing process has developed greatly throughout the semester. At first, I was not a fan of how much drafting we were required to do as a class. However, my feelings changed when I realized how much easier it was to compose a final paper when I had already completed the majority of the research. The most enjoyable part of researching for my final paper was finding non-scholarly sources that helped me to develop my ideas in a deeper way. I found newspaper articles from the 1960s and Spotify playlists that helped me find my voice in what I was trying to portray. In my initial self-assessment, I wrote that my drafting was weak as I tended to just write a paper and turn it in without any revising or previous drafts. I have greatly improved upon that. One thing I noticed, however, was I felt like I was struggling to tie together all my sources in my final paper - something I had written was a struggle for me at the beginning of the semester. Clearly, I could have used more practice in that arena. The social aspect of writing was also heightened in this class as opposed to other English classes I have taken. Being accountable for another student helped me to manage my time wisely, and the feedback was generally helpful in further development of my ideas. I liked knowing I only had an hour before I had to report back to another student about how much work I had completed. Overall, I know that this class stretched me and especially my writing process. I had a lot going on in my life this semester, as we all did, and especially now with COVID-19. But the way this class was organized helped me to be able to keep up with the required assignments in a reasonable timeline.

Caroline Parry's Reflection of Final Paper

I am very grateful to have learned a lot this semester.  What really helped me was learning how to add non scholarly sources to papers.  For this final paper, it helped to look at those first and get a general idea and then to build off those sources.  It made the paper more interesting to read song lyrics, have fanart images, and to hear from intelligent people who haven't published in journals.  My writing process has changed by looking at those less scholarly sources at the beginning and then building a rough draft based on what I find.  I then would go to more scholarly sources and weave all that information together.   I also learned to better talk with people about my work and have more useful peer reviews.  I still don't love doing them, but I have found them effective.  It's been great to write more about what I want for my last paper of my college career!