First Semester Writing Reflection

Over the course of the semester, my writing skills have improved immensely. I started the year with an unsure understanding of many advanced writing mechanisms that I needed to use in this class. I changed my understanding of good writing from the ground up by reevaluating all the places my writing seemed to be lacking in. My thesis statements were vanilla, my introductions too broad, and my analysis never connected back to a deeper meaning (hence the name of my blog...). My writing now is not flawless, but months of actively working to reform my work has definitely made an impact. I went from doing incredibly poorly on in-class essays and short responses to getting nearly perfect scores on almost all of the recent ones. I'm proud of this, considering how long it took for me to understand exactly where I was going wrong. In fact, it became awfully frustrating at times as well. I didn't understand why I was still receiving a poor mark even after fixing what I thought went wrong. As of right now, I'm actually glad that I was graded so "harshly" in the beginning of the year or else I would have never realized where my writing was truly lacking.
A specific change I made to my writing was definitely outlining my argument before I started writing. By beginning each piece with a concrete understanding of exactly what point I wanted to make, I was able to actually establish a well-thought out argument and provide the right analysis to supplement it. My analysis was now actually relevant to the prompt and the position I was taking on it.
Even though I believe that my greatest improvement has been in my use of analysis, I also believe that it will still be what I focus on the most in the future. After all, what is a good paper if it doesn't have excellent analysis? In order to further my writing skills, all I ask is that I receive the brutally honest feedback I need on every writing piece of mine. Seeing feedback on my writing, whether it's good or bad, allows me to see exactly what I'm doing right and wrong. I can fine-tune the elements of my writing that I do the best with and keep working to improve the elements that need it.