This class has been a challenge, but without being challenged it is hard to grow in any area. A person who wants to build muscle will not achieve that goal by lifting weights until their muscles start to hurt, they need to “pump iron” past the pain. A pro surfer started off on the small waves, but they had to gradually be challenged by the bigger and bigger waves to get to the spot that they are at. I am not a “pro” writer after taking this class, but I do feel that through the diversity of challenges in writing and critical thinking, I have made improvements.
This is a writing class but the majority of writing each week was not formal essays. We have had writing assignments in the form of critical thinking questions from our book, blogging, discussion boards, and blog responses. I think that I have improved the most in thinking critically and then clearly expressing my formulated opinions and thoughts. One of the hardest things for me is to clearly express my thoughts on a subject, it takes time. In this class I have had lots of practice in forming an opinion on a topic that I might not have been too familiar with and then expressing those opinions in the form of writing. As the semester has progressed, I have become a bit faster at putting my newly formed thoughts into the written word. I have also improved, I think, in providing thoughtful responses to other people’s blogs and the minimum word requirement has been a major part of that. When responding to your blog and group posts, I usually say all I want in a response within 100 words. To get full credit I need 200 -250 words but I don’t want to meet the word requirement with nonsense. This has challenged me to process your blogs and group posts more deeply and formulate a meaningful response that is long enough for full credit.
The area I have grown the least in is in essay writing and it is my own fault due to laziness. I do not enjoy most writing and for some reason essay and research writing is my least favorite. It takes me forever to finally force myself to sit down and start writing an essay. I save it till the last minute and get burned out with it. Then when I have enough pages I am over writing and say that I’ll work harder on the revision but then save that till the last minute too, so I have not spent as much time as I should (except with my 2nd essay) with working on making my essays the best that they can be. The result is that I have not grown and improved too much in this sort of writing. I do have more English classes to take though so maby for those classes it will be a different story! : )
-E
I agreed with you throughout your entire blog. I have improved the most from blogs and critical thinking. These get us thinking and writing faster than before. Thanks to these two things, I can write essays so much faster and it’s not such a pain to write them. Like you said you wait till the last minute, I do the exact thing. I wait till the day before to start writing, this can be bad because it seems rushed and not to our full ability. To me it helps because it makes me sit down and focus on my writing. I can write better under pressure because I know it is due, any other time I get easily distracted and find something else to do. I do think the blogs and the critical thinking have helped me to be a better writer. The essays are no fun, but these things have prepared us for these essays. It makes us able to write faster and just let the words flow out. It is not as hard to respond to something because we always had a word count requirement. This is what that has helped us the most. We are able to respond with a lengthy response, without it being so dull.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that in order to get better at something you have to challenge yourself with things that are beyond your reach. Only by doing so, you will get better at whatever you want to; it is all about practice and more practice. In this class I also learned to push myself and improve in my critical thinking area. I have never been good with words and every assignment was a struggle, but through our blogging experience and all the other assignments we had to do, I have come a little closer to being a great writer. I may not be perfect, or even a little bit close to it, but my writing skills have improved in a noticeable way and I am very surprised with myself. I am happy that you are able to express your thoughts on paper now and give your opinion. Being lazy comes to everyone naturally. I know this by first hand experience. I am very lazy and I know I could do better in every course if I push myself out of that but that is only up to me and no one else. I encourage you to push yourself because if you do so you will improve even more.
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