Reflective Essay: What Makes An Expert

In evaluating my own writing, I suffer from both seeing it the way I envision it and being overly critical. I find it hard to evaluate my strengths. Though I have learned through this course, I realize that I still have much work ahead of me. My main difficulties with each essay are forming my thesis statements and topic sentences, finding the right words to convey my point, organization and a few grammatical weaknesses. My initial thesis statements were weak. In the first graded essay (the Whole Process essay)," What Makes an Expert", my beginning attempt at a thesis statement was "Expertise doesn 't have to include invention or innovation, being an expert means performing one’s tasks with ease when in fact it isn 't." Besides the contractions, the run-on and the tense changes it is not anywhere near strong enough thesis to support the essay. My second attempt "Taking a highly technical skill that few others can perform and making it look easy, is also a form of expertise." was not any better. After work and help from a tutor I feel my final effort is simple, yet strong enough. “What assists in the making of an expert is time, effort, practice and sometimes talent.” In my Argumentative essay, it only took a few tries to come up with my thesis statement. I went from my initial thesis “We need to return to a format of …show more content…
When it comes to finding the right words to say, I have trouble: being either too complicated or too simple. There are many grammar checkers on the web, and some of them want a person to have a certain percentage of vocabulary words. Others tell you that an expression is too complex, (usually the same words!) I try to keep a balance between both and only pull out a thesaurus when I notice I am repeating a phrase too much. Though the phrase ‘an expert’ does appear rather frequently in the “What Makes an Expert” essay, I feel that is the point. To refuse to use those words might take away some of the