Final Blog

I feel that my writing has improved a lot since the beginning of the semester. I feel my writing has become more academic and that I sound a lot more educated now. There has been a lot of elements that I have worked on to do this improvement. One inparticular would be choosing a strong argument. At the beginning of the year, I would choose arguments that were very observational or ones that were very hard to support. Now I can see the difference in a strong argument and the opposite. Another thing that has changed for the better has been my word choice. I have learned which words sound more academic. This also helps with writing college level papers. For the argument aspect, the questions you gave us helped a lot. I found myself writing out the answers to those questions to find my argument. Freewriting these questions let me organize my ideas better. For the word choice aspect, the grammar guides were very helpful. I actually caught myself using one of the words in just everyday conversation. I really surprised myself. I felt like the Dr. Faustus paper was the easiet for me to complete because of feedback on previous papers. I know from the Zamyatin paper and the short story paper what exactly I needed to improve on. I took your comments from these and applied them to this paper. It helped make my paper of better quality. For the most beneficial lesson, I feel like the open discussions were most helpful. They presented new ideas to all of us to help us form a thesis statement. I do feel like I am better prepared to write college level papers now. This class really showed me what seemed like little mistakes but really affected my whole paper. Before I thought that having a thesis statement that I believed in was enough but if there is no support behind it, your paper will not be of high quality. That backup is very important.