Jose Lopez
4/30/22
English 110
Self Assessment Final Draft
In the course of 5 months now, I have developed as a writer and a reader. Something about me is that I never really enjoyed reading because oftentimes I read too slow and it takes too long for me to finish a book. But after writing more I started reading more short stories online and I realized how much I was reading. I even finally started writing my own horror stories. In this short amount of time I have become more in tune with my own voice and pairing it with my writing to give it life. I am proud of where I am and how much I have grown since then.
In the months that have passed my essays have been getting better each time I write one. When I was younger I loved comic books and I drew my own so when it came to writing I liked writing horror stories that would use a lot of imagery in order to make what I was writing come to life. It was hard at first but as I progressed as a writer it got easier to do each time. Words started flooding my brain and the paper became an empty space to fill and eventually become an organized lake of my works. I show this in my first drafts usually because it’s a space where I can just put words down without having to worry about the wording yet. It is something I can plan out first and fix later. My work tends to take longer because I want to make it perfect but I’ve come to realize that I can’t expect perfection immediately. I first need to plan things out for the long run and then can I begin to even think about perfection.
Something I also have improved on is balancing out my voice with the academic side of my essay. Something I tend to do a little too much in my essays and writing is adding too much of my own personality and voice into the essay that it starts feeling less academic. While it is good for me to do so, for a college level essay it cannot simply be a funny goofy essay, it needs to fit the criteria and match with the rubric. I have a set goal to reach and if I don’t meet this goal then I will fail regardless of how much emotion I put into the essay. In my essays you can hear my own voice while still getting that same balance of academic work from me. I mix it properly to have a proper college level writing criteria without having a dry tone to it. The idea of being able to do that was hard for me a long time ago because I felt like both should be separated. School and emotional tones in writing didn’t seem to match up, but once I started reading more and more recently I feel it is something I made to seem hard for a long time.
There are still many things left for me to improve though. Many of my transitions tend to be much more basic and lack any higher educational examples. I stick to the usual “For example,…” or “This article stated that…” because it is a safe option for someone like me who tends to write for fun most of the time. It isn’t something I feel is important but it can change a lot. It can make a paper feel more educated on the topic compared to what I would normally use because it makes me sound like I have a basic knowledge of what I am writing about, especially for a research topic. I want to improve on this and hopefully get to a point in my writing where it can sound more professional or at least more educated. Being stuck at the basic transition level can be hard to get rid of especially when you have never used many others before.
While I have improved and grown as a writer it is clear I still have ways to go but that doesn’t mean I am going to stop or quit. There are plenty of times in my writing that I feel like I should stop because I may not know where to go with what I’m doing. But with this class and the freewrites I have been given a chance to do better and fix my writing.
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