Wrapping Up The Essay
- Lauren B
- 0
- on Dec 03, 2022
This week I met with Keanna and got feedback on my essay. Going into the meeting I felt confident about my work, even though I had written it in a short period of time I still felt that it was of the same quality as my other drafts that I’ve gone over with her. During our meeting, we mainly discussed how redundant I was being in my writing which is something I’ve struggled with not only this semester but most of my life. This also leads to me overwriting and going past the word limit because I just keep writing the same concept multiple times. This extremely hinders my writing skills and the impact it can have because eventually it gets tiring reading the same thing over and over again and causes the reader to lose interest in what you’re writing about. Additionally, this causes me to become frustrated with my own writing because I’m constantly writing the same sentence just in different ways. This is definitely something I came across as I wrote my paper which was partly in because I wrote it over a short amount of time. I wasn’t giving myself enough time to break in between writing my essay and let new ideas flow that I could later add to my paper. Instead, I was cramming the same concepts into my head and trying to formulate them into words which led to a lot of redundancy. At the beginning of the year when we wrote our first essay and I found myself way above the word limit I asked Keanna for advice and she told me to break each paragraph down sentence by sentence. So that’s what I’ve done ever since. It allows me to look at every sentence as its own distinct entity rather than something as part of a whole which shows me what words are just filler and where some words can outright be deleted. This is also where I fix the redundancy problem because I can physically see myself repeating the idea and correct it. This system has worked really well for me, allowing me to cut just under 500 words from each of my essays. For this essay with the increased word maximum, I don’t have to cut as much to be under the word limit but under Keanna’s suggestion, I’m going to try to still cut a lot. She recommended that I cut down a lot because I’m just repeating the same message every time and after the first time it gets tiring to hear. Something I also decided to do as a result of my meeting was to rephrase the first topic sentence of my first body paragraph to promote a more clear understanding of organization. As it is that body paragraph doesn’t make sense to be first so by changing the first sentence it clears up any confusion with the organization. By the time I got to the end of that first body paragraph I had already cut down my essay to be under the word limit but I didn’t stop there. Just because I had reached a safe point to stop doesn’t mean I should, there’s always a way to improve and hone in on your craft as we’ve learned this semester. Whether that be from approaching it in different ways or trying to start in a place, for me the growth comes in learning how to be more concise. In the end, I ended up cutting over four hundred words from my essay, something I’m really happy to say I did.
Writing isn’t a linear process from start to finish. It’s thinking of an idea, starting to write, meeting to talk about your idea, researching, more writing, meeting again, revising, and yes more writing. Writing is about the journey, not the destination. The point of the process is to grow, something I know I’ve done this semester
