Jaidyn's Academic Writing Self-assessment

One of my strengths in academic writing is that I can generally keep the paper focused around a central claim. While learning to write papers as a child, I was bothered by the need to have a thesis statement; my ideas seemed too varied and numerous to capture in one sentence. Now, having a central claim is immensely helpful to me. It influences every aspect of the work– each subclaim, piece of evidence, and quotation must ultimately act as support for the claim. Having a strong thesis gives me purpose and motivation as I write.

Before going on, I would like to say that I know how important it is for academic writing to be filled with reliable sources and evidence. With that said, I hate having to fill my papers with reliable sources and evidence. I am not good at research, despite hours of practice clicking on links to scholarly articles. In my freshman year biology class, the final project was a paper, and it was a stretch just to find the three required scholarly sources and apply them well.

Magda's Academic Writing Self-Assessment

When I write formal essays, I've found that one of my strengths is coming up with ideas and organizing them well. I'm good at brainstorming and choosing ideas that I like and then presenting them in a way that makes sense and is easy to read. However, sometimes I tend to "talk out" my own ideas on paper, causing me to sometimes repeat the same idea several different ways. So readers are often able to understand my ideas relatively well, but sometimes feel beaten over the head with them. In an essay I wrote my freshman year, for example, I did a rhetorical analysis of an excerpt from Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar, and while I was proud of the analysis that I did and thought I communicated it simply and clearly, I could find several places where I sounded a slightly redundant, which I feel might have been kind of frustrating for the reader.

Savannah's Academic Writing Self-Assessment

Although I'm not a professional writer by any means I've found that one of my strengths is finding effective and convincing research to support my argument and claim. In my Writing 150 class my freshman year we wrote a final argumentative research paper and I feel like I had found very applicable evidence to support my argument that poverty levels are affecting high school drop out rates. However, when starting this paper it took me weeks and weeks to come up with my topic and I changed it a few times in the process. I think I need to find a new way to come up with topics that are meaningful and applicable to my academic writing. Another aspect of my academic writing that I could work on is drafting my essays out earlier. In the past, I have been a bit of a procrastinator and I tend just to skip all drafting stages and just sort of "vomit" my essay onto the page and turn it in the next day. I think if I improved my drafting skills I would have more time to edit and improve my writing.

Dylan's Academic Writing Self-Assessment

   When it comes to writing eloquent and persuasive essays, there's still a lot I have to improve on. A majority of the time, I can have good analysis of a piece, but as I start writing the essay, I find I have trouble balancing the various points in my essay.
   An example can be found in an essay I wrote during the previous semester in my ENGL 251 class on Nathanial Hawthorne's short story, "Young Goodman Brown." I found I had insightful analysis of the essay, in particular with a reader-response approach of the text. When writing the actual essay, it was difficult for me to maintain a good balance between analysis and summary. I tended to spend too much time explaining the context of a certain scene and not enough time explaining the effect certain literary choices had on the audience and how it accomplished that.

James' Academic Writing Self-Assessment

                I feel like one of my strengths in academic writing is my authorial voice. I find that, especially when I am writing something that I care about, my authorial voice comes across very well. I have been able to write a variety of authorial personas, ranging from sarcastic and scathing to logical and unbiased. One example of this was an essay I wrote in Eng 251, where my teacher commented he really loved my voice and tone.

                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 noticed this with a variety of my essays in Writing 150.

Magda's Shelfies

Kayla's Academic Writing Self-Assessment

Academic writing has always made more sense to me than creative writing. You do the research, you read the book, you write about it. It’s a simple formula; the steps are linear. Academic writing is laid out in front of me in a nice organized path of stepping stones. Except when it isn’t. Sometimes the stepping stones are laid out in twelve different directions in a lake of molten lava. 

My greatest strength in academic writing lies in literary analysis. I feel that I typically understand and can explain the text I am studying. I like having a solid source with which I can base my ideas upon. My weakness lies in my drafting habits. I tend to knock an entire paper out with one great swing, failing to review my work before submitting and hoping for the best. If I took more time to carefully craft each piece of my papers, I would be able to develop stronger main ideas. In my research paper about menstrual advertisements in China last semester, I was able to effectively explain and synthesize twenty scholarly articles, but I struggled to come up with clear main points between so many sources.