Reflecting on Personal Writing Skills: A Self-assessment

Overview About You

Writing to you as a college undergraduate, my writing skills seem on par with someone who has just graduated high school. I thought my writing would improve after I graduated high school; but it didn’t. After seeing essays that my college friends wrote, I look back at the few essays I wrote in college and I can’t stop myself in thinking that I must be one of the worst essay writers at UC Davis. The two AP English classes I took in high school have given me less confidence as a writer, as I am always trying, and eventually failing, to implement the rigid writing guidelines from those two classes into the classes I took in college. This may be explained by my Meyers-Briggs personality test results, which claim that my introversion,

sensing, thinking, and judgment are to blame for my writing techniques. As I continue with my college writing career with this class and with other future endeavors, I hope to be able to silence the continuing problems that I face when writing an essay so that my writing can improve to the level expected of an undergraduate student so that I can successfully achieve any future goals I may have.

Writing Background

While I was forced to write numerous papers in college, my last true writing class was an AP English class my senior year of high school. While my high school English teacher told me I was a good writer, my first grade of a C in my first ever college essay made me believe he was lying to me. My C paper told me my paper was very scattered, that I did not back up my arguments very well, and that the few examples I had did not really relate to the main point of my paper. The next paper I wrote for the class had little improvement from the first monstrosity I wrote. I continued to struggle with the same problems. It was evident that my writing style was stuck in high school mode, not progressing to the college level I was hoping it would reach.

Could my struggle of transitioning from being a high school essay writer to a college one be attributed to my personality?

The Meyers-Briggs Personality Test I took last week suggested that as an introvert, sensing, thinking and judging individual I struggle to decide what to include in a paper, I often lack strong examples in my essays, I don’t recognize if the content of my essays are clear, and I tend to not ask for help when I struggle in dealing with these problems I face. Sadly, all of these are true. My writing style and my personality type were in agreement that my essays had lots of problems. Maybe it’s my personality that is causing trouble in my writing and not me fixating on writing techniques from high school. Maybe both are contributing. Whatever the answer, I enter another essay writing college class with the same problematic writing that caused me much grief after graduating from high

school.

Course Goals

Facing numerous difficulties in my writing before coming into this class, I am hoping that I will be able to fix the writing problems I am plagued with. Circling back to my flawed writing style as suggested by the Meyer-Briggs personality test, a common difficulty I face in my writing is that I struggle to strengthen the content of my paper. My papers tend to bounce around different ideas between and within paragraphs, weakening the message of my paper. While I like to pride myself on my excellent thesis writing skills, the weakness of the content in my essays due to this jumbling overrides my strong thesis.

I would also like to work on having better focus on my essays. As suggested by my writing personality, my essays have the tendency to drift away from certain ideas. This creates a big problem in essays as I often struggle to stay on topic not only with respect to the prompt, but also with respect to individual ideas within paragraphs. This goes along with my previous problem of bouncing around between ideas. By taking this rigorous writing course, I am hoping that I will be able to better see the constant focus issues that occur throughout my writing.

I am also hoping that I will be able to reach out to other more frequently and get their opinions and input on my writing. I tend to not seek out help on essays even when I truly need it. By taking this course, I am hoping the difficulty of the different essay assignments will force me to seek out advice. By allowing my professor, an English graduate student, or even one of my housemates to look over my essay, I believe that my essays will benefit from the feedback I receive. I am hoping that by taking this course that my Meyers-Briggs associated writing style of not seeking out advice, on top of struggling to maintain focus and strengthen the content of my paper, that I will be able to better correct for the pitfalls of my writing styles.

Life Goals

While this class may be the last writing class I take in my life, I am hoping that the goals I achieve in this class will allow me to use my changed writing style and techniques in order to be successful in in achieving my life goal.

While my life goal of getting into veterinarian school may not seem like it applies to my writing problems and goals for this course, they are in actuality essential to that. To get into veterinary school, I have to do well on the GRE, as well as write a successful personal statement. All of these requirements heavily rely on excellent writing skills, which relate to my personality-based flaws of my style of writing

essays.

The GRE devotes an entire section of the test to writing, in which a good score on that section requires good writing skills you acquired throughout college. Having improved writing skills through maintaining focus and having strong content that I am hoping to achieve from this class will allow me to achieve a better score. The personal statement is another important aspect of vet school that relies heavily on good writing schools. If I am able to see the flaws in my writing and improve upon them, my personal statement would improve immensely, thus making me a better candidate for vet school. These improved writing skills and techniques that I am hoping to gain by achieving the course goals I set for myself will allow me to achieve the life goal by setting me up for success for the specific requirements for that life goal.