Reflective Essay Midterm Self Assessment

Reflective Essay 2: Midterm Self-Assessment

I used to believe that I was one of the few unfortunate people that were not blessed with writing a well thought out paper in a brief amount of time. However, from class discussions and reading assignments such as “Shitty First Draft”, it became clear that writing does not come easy to anyone. Learning this piece of information has brought to my attention one major flaw of my writing process: believing that only proofreading my first draft will result in an excellent final draft. Instead of taking time to create a “shitty” first draft, I spent long hours trying to formulate my thoughts so that my first draft could be a great quality paper. Because of this, I would get frustrated when writing if my

Learning this weakness in my writing process is important because it has enabled me to mature as a writer. When I started working on my research review article, I decided to try the foreign idea of creating a “shitty first draft”. Instead of staring at my computer screen for hours on end so that all the right words would flow out, I was able to simply create an outline in which I wrote down all of my thoughts and ideas. After my outline was completed, I scheduled my time so that I would sit at my kitchen table for two hours a day to do revision on my paper a week before the assignment was due. What I learned from this experience is that I am a more effective writer when I give myself shorter time intervals to write. This is because after a few hours of writing without any interruptions, my mind tends to wonder, resulting in my thoughts being incoherent. In order to improve my writing from hereon, I plan on altering my writing process so that I am creating a first draft that will eventually result in me having a final draft

Although I had written a well thought-out cover-letter in my targeted application package, it was a bit long, almost like a personal narrative. I know that being concise and straight to the point will enable my audience to grasp my message a lot faster. This is especially important for the upcoming health education material that must be clearly and concisely written for the lay audience. As I am working on this assignment, I will keep in mind what Professor Ross said, “When you are done with your final draft, go back and cut out 10% of the information”. Because I know that I tend to be wordy, I will try to cut out 20% of my information. I am optimistic about my overall success in this course as I have already gained vital information that have allowed me to keep my audience in mind throughout my entire paper, thus strengthening my rhetorical