Reflecting More on My Writing Process

Investigating Focuses Thoughts on The Course and More

In this blog post, I will be responding to directed questions to reflect further upon myself as a writer as I prepare to create my rough draft for the Final Reflection Project for this course. In doing so, I will generate specific, honest answers that will act as material to draw from as I compose my draft.

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1. My biggest challenges that I faced this semester were the Saturday deadlines that consisted of blogposts as forms of pre-writing for the projects, and also motivating myself. I often encountered trouble in using my time throughout the week to make steady progress on this course - rather, I would divide my time each week to focus on one class at time, which usually resulted in me having to see to my English work on the day of the deadline. Additionally, having moved out in the latter third of this semester, I found that the change in environment and responsibility severely impacted my ability to motivate myself to work with dedication on this course's material.

2. This semester, I learned much about my time management skills, and also rediscovered my strengths as a writer. As far as time management goes, I realized that I truly have lacking skills when it comes to producing consistent work across weekly deadlines, which has served as a type of reality-check. I figured this out simply by seeing how often I worked on the day of the deadline, or after the deadline, each week - which ended up being much more frequent than I'm proud of. Additionally, as a writer, this course reinforced my belief that I work best when I've had time to thoroughly consider my drafts ahead of writing them, and when I'm passionate about what I'm writing. Project 2 and especially Project 3 were evidence of how I produced high quality (each earning high As) writing once I had contemplated them in detail and was able to write passionately about them, since I was able to choose the subject matter of both of those projects.

3. Before this semester, I honestly do not think that I paid special attention to genre, because most of my experience with writing was always with some form of essay. This course, however, with its focus on genre variety, was insightful in that it forced me to pay special attention to conventions and to master them in order to write a Quick Reference Guide, Rhetorical Analysis Essay for a specific audience and context, and an opinionated, informed article featuring on Slate.com.  Undoubtedly, being aware of conventions of genres is central to the writing process as it largely affects the presentation of one's works of writing and also can serve as a base from which to work off of when composing a draft.

4. I think the most valuable skills I will take from this course to apply in future classes are writing genuine, idea-based drafts and also refining time management habits. As I've mentioned, for Project 3 I completed the draft in one long, stream-of-consciousness session, that produced a thorough but not necessarily polished product that I then improved in revision to create a truly thorough, well-crafted final work. In addition, my struggles with time management in this class have made me more skilled in recognizing my shortcomings in time management, and thus I hope to stay aware of my weaknesses and eventually improve upon them when it comes to using my time for coursework in the future.

5. I think my most effective moment in this course was the writing of my Public Argument project on artificial intelligence as a potential artistic medium. It was the first project I had written in my new home and I wrote it while having a profound difficulty in motivating myself, yet it was easily the most well-crafted piece of writing I produced this semester, which I attribute to my venturing outside of my typical writing process in order to write the draft through stream-of-consciousness and actually waiting to perfect the local qualities of the work until revision. The grade for the project didn't lie, and I truly feel that my article for that project was well-done and something to be proud of.

6. My least effective moments in this English class were how often I was behind in coursework and was forced to work with late penalties. As I've discussed, I had trouble with time management this semester, which was only made worse by my difficulty in motivating myself once I had moved, and altogether that resulted in me often missing deadlines and getting graded lowly on work that really was of high quality, that was only brought down by its lack of timeliness.