End of Year Writing Review
- Lauren B
- 0
- on Dec 06, 2022
At the beginning of this semester, I was extremely worried about how my writing skills would adapt to college. I didn’t think that the transition would be easy and in a way, both of those sentiments are true and yet false. When I was writing my first essay I knew it had to be greater than what I had written before but I didn’t exactly know how to make it better. During my research process, I realized that I was finding evidence that went against my thesis. Still, instead of freaking out, I decided to incorporate it into my essay as a rebuttal. Something that I continued to include in my essays going forward. I found that including rebuttals often filled the gaps in my essay when I didn’t consider them to be complex enough and helped me think about specific pieces of evidence in a different way or challenged me. With the World War II letter writing an essay all the evidence I had from Jews who died was very emotional and angry which completely contradicted my thesis that they kept a strong face to reassure their family so I included that emotion in my thesis and added on to my other analyses for my other pieces of evidence. In the final essay, I do this as well, weaving in the idea of my rebuttal throughout. I like this because it meant that no matter what someone read or thought they were constantly being challenged. They’re forced to think, not just read something. However, an area I would like to improve in is being concise, non-redundant, and overall just writing less. The whole semester (and even before that) I’ve struggled with overwriting. Every single essay this semester I’ve had to cut over four hundred words from. I’ll be completely done with the essay but then I need to spend three days cutting from it. Though this does seem like a good problem to have, especially in a collegiate setting where writing eight to ten-page papers is the norm but it promotes bad habits. Being redundant and repeating the same idea twenty times, taking longer on the essay than you should, and getting frustrated with your own writing because you don’t know how to expand on something. This hit me especially hard in the World War II letter-writing essay. It was the first essay of the semester and the first complex one I had written since the Winter of 2021. During my writing process, I just kept writing and it took me days to cut everything down but with the final essay, I did it all in one night. Within an hour I had significantly cut down my paper, doing all of the essay instead of just stopping when I reached two thousand and it came really easy to me. I recognized where I was being redundant and cut entire sentences. I know writing isn’t a linear process and I’m happy to say that I’ve grown from where I started.
