Personal Narrative: My Personal Writing Process

Project 1 - Personal Writing Process

I like to think of myself as a creative writer. However, it is true that the majority of my writing time is dedicated to educational writing for school. So currently I am a creative writer in spirit and an educational writer out of necessity. I have taken around seven English classes so far in my college career including Critical Thinking and Logic, American Literature, Topics in Multi-Ethnic Literature, and Creative Writing. All of those courses included analytical essays typically involving development of central themes discussed and personal analyzation. I have also taken a few other classes that required writing like Psychology and U.S. Women’s History. Those two classes were more geared …show more content…
I do this in order to gain a clear understanding of what the paper is asking of me. Next, I consult all the materials given, or collected by me, to begin to form an idea about what I want my paper to state. Then I start my outline. Outlining is a pretty simple process for me it usually includes headings that state the main idea of the paragraph with bullet points of supporting detail. This is just meant to give me a rough idea of what I am going to talk about. After the outlining I begin to type my first draft. This is typically a long, painstaking process for me. I try to get everything just so in the first draft, knowing that there will be at least two or three more to come. Once I finish the initial draft I sleep. It is a very important part of my writing process to put a paper down for at least twenty-four hours, which hopefully include a decent amount of sleep, and come back to it with a fresh mind. I think this gives me a much better understanding of what needs to be developed and what is useless information. Depending on time constraints for the paper I will try to pick it back up the next day and go through the first reread, which will be my first attempt a the first step of my revising …show more content…
The strengths and weaknesses in this paper are glaringly apparent to me now, but then I obviously missed them or had not taken the time to correct them. My biggest weakness with writing in general, and in relation to this American History essay, is forming a clear thesis. I know this for multiple reasons. One, it never feels very clear when I’m writing it, I feel like I try to stick in a bunch of information that doesn’t need to be there and do not develop the statement of the paper clearly enough. Also, every essay I receive back comes with a comment referring to an unclear thesis. In this American History paper the thesis is more of a paragraph than a statement, which I think can be effective, but not in this case. What was considered to be the thesis statement was as follows: “Even though the list of reasons to not become an activist had grown extremely long, Moody and many others took up the cause to fight for justice and equality.” Looking at this now, it does seem like an unclear statement. Why did they take up the cause? Why is it important? It is an underdeveloped thought. Even when going back to the outlining that I did for this paper, and most of my outlines, it shows that no clear thesis was ever