At the beginning of my journey here in Writing 37, I expressed that writing was not one of my favorite subjects, and I viewed myself as a mediocre writer. Due to this insecurity of being incompetent, I never took the plunge and enrolled in an AP English course during high school. Therefore, this is the first class I am taking that is requiring an extreme amount of time to organize my thoughts into something that will develop into a well-rounded essay. The past seven weeks have been quite the journey; and I will tell you all about it. Within the first weeks of class, I did not put as much time as I should have into my writing practices, due twice a week. This included providing answers for approximately five questions with the inclusion of evidence and responses to two peers. The inadequate time put into my work at first is shown explicitly in my second writing practice. I failed to conduct an effective amount of research on the time periods mentioned and only answered the question with my own common knowledge. After I realized that I was not putting enough effort into my studies, I changed my writing habits by providing evidence to back up my claims. I attempted to incorporate this new approach within my responses to the following writing practices by adding specific quotes from the text and giving these quotes meaning. An example of this is shown in my final draft of my RA, in which I pick out certain quotes from the author, interpret them, and explain how his views of the subject at hand is shown.

One of my strengths in my writing is my ability to obtain evidence from a text in order  to analyze it as a means to develop my main thesis. This can be shown by the integration of quotes within my Rhetorical Analysis. I tried my best to use quotes I thought were appropriate within the essay. An example that comes to mind is my introduction paragraph for my Rhetorical Analysis. The integrated quotes helped me develop the thesis I wanted to create, while using the words of the author. A specific sentence I chose was ‘The author takes notice that his son has been exposed to blacks being beaten and shot for just “seeking help” or “browsing in a department store” and explains that such injustice is all too “common for black people” (9).’ My introduction paragraph is something I am fairly proud, when I think back on my past assignments completed in this class thus far. I would like to improve on being concise. With the struggle to reach a certain page limit or word count, my natural tendency is to want to expand on the topic at hand and this can sometimes end up being repetitive or wordy. I’d like to begin to understand how I can let my writing flow freely while still building on what is being developed.

    Within the last seven weeks, I learned that I need an outline of my thoughts before I can begin writing something. Especially with the Rhetorical Analysis, I composed an outline that I used, revised, and expanded on a little bit each day. The purpose of this technique was to get my thoughts down, know what I want to explain, and improve the essay whenever I was in the right mindset to do so. An exercise that has helped me improve as a writer was having to peer review other essays. This helped me realize other people’s mistakes and even connect them to my own. Also, peer reviewing gave me an opportunity to suggest advice to others as to how to go about improving their paper while applying this advice to my own writing journey. While others have reviewed my paper, I received helpful pointers from them asking me to expand on certain claims and to “organize the context” in a different way to as to connect better to the thesis.