Throughout my first semester at Moravian College my writing has improved significantly. My overall knowledge of almost every nuance that there is when it comes to writing an academic paper began to grow exponentially as well. At the beginning of the semester I was a writer with no confidence, who did not enjoy any type of writing because I struggled with certain aspects of my paper. Over the course of this semester and the constant writing I found myself writing comfortably. I saw an improvement in my writing and my grades because I used the feedback from past assignments to make sure I did not make the same mistakes twice. As a writer my greatest downfalls were having a sense of rhetoric, developing and organizing my ideas, and creating a strong thesis. I believe that the skills I learned in this class, such as creating outlines and the revision process has improved my weaknesses.
I never realized how oftenly used rhetoric and rhetoric sensitively were used in writing. Once I understood the meaning of the two terms my personal use of rhetoric in my writing improved.
This understanding allowed me to properly distinguish the language in my writing for something casual like a SSJ assignment to a formal assignment like the PSA's.
In this SSJ you can see that my sentences are choppy, I use a lot of personal pronouns and my writing is more casual and to the point.
In my PSA, due to my better understanding of rhetoric, I am much more formal in my writing. I explain my ideas in full sentences. As well as, I expand my vocabulary.
Many times I would find myself staring at a blank paper trying to develop a thesis statement. A thesis statement is supposed to state the main idea(s) of a writing assignment, which helps to control the main ideas through out the paper. In WA 1 my thesis statement did not properly touch upon every idea in my writing assignment, therefore, it did not properly support my arguments and claims in the rest of the paper.
I was however able to improve upon this mistake in a future assignment. I really took into account the section in Chapter 5 in Ede, Making and Supporting Claims, that talked about developing a working thesis. In my research portfolio I showed improvement in my thesis statement. I stated the main ideas in my paper allowing me to collect back to my thesis throughout my writing
As a writer I struggled with developing my ideas. I was able to come up with ideas to write about but then I stumbled when trying to further explain those ideas. I think that the reason I got better at developing my ideas was a result of creating an outline. Creating an outline before writing a paper allowed me to write down my ideas for the paper and then narrow in on the importance of each idea.
The pre-work I did was the base of my outline which made it really easy for me to organize and develop my ideas in my final PSA writing assignment. This improvement encouraged me to create outlines for all of my other writing assignments as well.
Over the time spent in this FYWS my writing has improved in many ways. I can now confidently write a strong thesis statement, apply rhetoric and better develop my ideas. I take the writing process more seriously than I did before by creating outlines and considering all the feedback I get from peer review sessions. I plan on continuing to use the skills I developed and learned from this FYWS class for the rest of my educational career at Moravian College and for the rest of my life.
Credits:
Created with images by DariuszSankowski - "knowledge book library" • Brett Jordan - "Rhetorical (2 of 2)" • jarmoluk - "education a good idea an array of" • shutterhacks - "Books"