Reflective Essay: Improving My Writing Process

Going into this class I felt that I had a fairly good understanding of writing. However, after receiving my first paper back it became quite apparent that the skill with which I had written in high school would not be sufficient at the collegiate level. My writing was wordy and inefficient, my punctuation was riddled with errors, especially with comma placement, and my theses were weak, and with poor attention to audience. By my second paper I had drastically improved the efficiency of my words, and reduced some of the simple errors, but many still remained. My papers were also still dry and related poorly to my audience. I made little progress going into the next paper. With many of the same errors made again and hardly any improvement in its appeal to my chosen audience. However, I had made great progress with my fifth paper being nearly devoid of the simple mistakes that had plagued my previous assignments, as well as engaging to an audience. …show more content…
In order to improve my writing I had to improve my editing process drastically. The first major problem was the time it took me to properly edit a paper. I had had much more time to do this in high school, so when the dead lines in college were much shorter I struggled to keep up with the pace on the first paper, but I had learned my lesson by the next paper and was ready to work on the method itself. I solved the wordiness of my papers by reading though it a few sentences at a time and determining what each one contributed to the paper. Unimportant or redundant sentences got shortened or removed