My Writing Weaknesses

After a year of being in English I, I still struggle with various writing techniques. What I struggle with most as a writer is creative writing. I often find myself lost when trying to create fictional stories. It is difficult for me to take a few words worth of an unreal topic and make a hundred of even crazier content. These difficulties are why my poetry was lackluster in every aspect. The lack of confidence often led to my unwillingness to participate in class due to a fear of the writing not being enough. This area of writing is significant because it gives the writer the ability to write an impressive amount of content about any topic. Once this skill is developed, most other forms are much simpler. I am eager to go into English II next year and hopefully develop my creative writing to push myself to be able to write an infinite amount of stories and poetry in and out of class.

My Writing Strengths

English I has been a class to develop writing skills. There are certain things that various people excel at, but my most useful traits are word choice and my ability to develop fact-based writing. I often find myself helping classmates with certain grammatical corrections and word choice. This skill is crucial in writing processes like editing, making the process much shorter and simpler. My next strongest trait is taking fact-based information and writing complete essays or short stories about them. One key example of this was the research paper, where my classmates spent insane amounts of time researching things that would not help them while I lacked sufficient information. I was able to expand and elaborate on the few pieces of information that I had obtained through research. This ability is also extremely helpful for pieces of writing like the literary analysis where the teacher required us to use specific textual evidence to support our claims. Overall, my writing strengths are often useful in school-related writing.

Future Writing Goals

This year, English has been extremely helpful in learning my strengths and weaknesses in numerous kinds of writing. I plan on improving many of my weaknesses next year in English II. The first major weakness I would like to improve upon is creative writing. This has always been a firm weakness of mine, bleeding into various types of writing like poetry, short stories, and essays, mainly narratives. My next problem lies in finding writing topics. I often spend as much time searching for an enjoyable as I do writing a first draft or an outline for an academic piece. My plan for next year is to consult with my teachers about these weaknesses, hoping to receive guidance to improve and turn my writing weaknesses into strengths. Once I have improved upon these, my brainstorming process will take less time, and I will be able to spend more time writing more quality papers.

Writing Center Experience

This semester, I went to the Writing Center for the portfolio project. I met with a writing fellow who helped a great deal in revising the literary analysis. We started with pulling out my paper for him to read. He then asked for the teacher’s comments on the piece, and he decided that we would focus on quotations and the conclusion, which were the two major issues with the piece. The quotations were improperly embedded, so he explained to me how to make the quotations flow smoother with the paper. He then read the paper’s introduction and conclusion, showing me how the conclusion did not tie the paper’s main focus together. He showed me various techniques to improve this conclusion, so I went with the approach of rewriting the conclusion with a new focus in mind. I took this advice home with me, immensely improving the piece of writing.