There has been a lot of good in my writing and some things that need improvement. I feel like when I am writing an analysis or academic paper it is very broad and boring. I felt that I learned from an outline and just put the outline into the essay. I also feel my writing format was the same five paragraph essay that we had to do in all of high school. I feel after the first academic paper that my academic writing has improved and changed drastically.
The rough draft was probably one of the worst writings I have done for this course. I didn’t understand what the topic I was trying to say was. It was a huge block of evidence and no analysis and then basically me restating what was happening in the first paragraph that I wrote. I can tell I rushed through that, I didn’t put a lot of thought into it. It was easy to tell I did not know what I was trying to prove or knew how to structure my essay differently than the five paragraph essay.
The final draft of the essay was totally different from what I had written before. It was not like a five paragraph essay; it was really an introduction to the topic, one big paragraph where I put all my analysis and evidence, and a conclusion to what I had written. I feel like it was the best writing that I did for the class. It was nothing like I had done before or in high school. I think that was where you can see how my development as a writer was displayed in that essay. However, there were some things that could have been better. I feel as if I can repeat myself a lot in the essays. I can also say the same things without saying the same words, and they all can be very similar. Also, in that essay I asked a lot of rhetorical questions instead of analyzing what I thought about it. I feel I could have done better with that.
We discussed a lot about the difference between summarizing and paraphrasing. I feel like my summarizing skills are a lot better than my paraphrasing skills. When we had to summarize it was easier for me and I would just put words on the paper of what I read and the only real hard part of it was trying to pick what was the main point of the story or essay. Paraphrasing would make my brain go crazy. It was like the scene from Spongebob when all the little Spongebobs are in his brain and they are all running and everything is on fire. That is how my brain feels when trying to paraphrase. I feel like I need to look over every word in the sentence very carefully. Trying to get the sentence to mean the same thing, but for it to say something different was probably the hardest type of writing I had to do for this course. Even though we only had to write one sentence for it. It took me so long to just form one sentenc
