Metamorphosis

1. At the beginning of the course, you mentioned two or three aspects of your writing that you most wanted to work on. How well have you met your goal of improving in those areas?
2. At this point, what would you say are your strengths as a writer?
3. What do you need to improve in your writing in the future?

 At the beginning of the semester, my main goal with writing was to better understand its forms in order to make my work easier to understand. Through this class and the process of development, I do feel that I have grown as a writer in both analytic and creative works. Also, I think that this class has taught me how to incorporate my own feelings and past experiences to my writing in a way that validates or adds to the piece rather than distracting from the argument.

I still think that my strength as a writer is being able to find inspiration anywhere. However, I have learned that I am capable of taking a piece and analyzing it to the extent that I find new ideas and can also back them up with other facts from the source used. Before this class, my weakness was writing analytic essays, as my inspiration and past experiences caused me to make my writing more flowery than it should, preventing the essay from moving forward to prove an argument. This is quickly becoming one of my strengths as I push myself in analytic projects to incorporate my inspiration, past experiences, and insight of the piece in order to make a captivating project for the reader.

In the future, I think that I will need to re-learn creative writing to a certain extent. I have become so comfortable with analytic assignments and that style of writing, that I find my creative work resembling that style more than its own. However, as I have always been enamored with creative writing and have done my best to avoid analytic essays, I think that this price is well worth the result of being able to succeed when writing anything even remotely argumentative for a course assignment. Also, I still have a long way to go in removing everything from my analytic essays that is not completely necessary or halts the forward movement of the paper. My goal for next semester and any assignments I may receive in other classes is to conquer this challenge and express only those thoughts and ideas that push the argument forward and prove it, moving the reader through the essay.