When I first began this course I remember assessing my own abilities as writer and not feeling I was very competent at writing in general. I felt that my word choice tended to be poor and simple. I had little experience with writing as a process. In the past often my papers would be started and finished just a few hours before they were due. I think because of my low estimation of myself as a writer I tended to do my best to stick to a clear structure when writing, often times this hindered me from finding my voice. I believe this portfolio shows significant improvement in my writing, demonstrating a process and voice that I had previously struggled to find.
In my first paper the original drafts were painfully unclear in parts and thanks to feedback from my peer reviews I was able to revise it to its current form where, I believe, I demonstrate an ability to write a structured argument with clear intent. However, I feel like I struggled the most finding my own voice, writing in a format I was previously unfamiliar with, focusing only on critiquing the authors effectiveness. My instructor's comments suggested possible revision strategies such as; finding places in my paper where I can go in to more detail about the emotional appeals the author was making, better transition statements between paragraphs, and a few awkward sentences that need to be rewritten or expounded upon.This feedback extremely useful to me, it identified areas where my writing can use improvement along with suggestions for those improvements. I often found myself referring to these comments to improve later papers.
In my second paper, I think I did fairly well at making my response. Personally, what I struggled with most with this assignment was finding my own voice, at times it I felt like I was quoting my sources a bit too much without any thought or analysis of my own. I dealt with this difficulty by scheduling an appointment with Cliff at the CTL, he helped me identify points in my paper where I could expand upon some of my talking points without making bold and generalized claims. I don't think I completely overcame this problem but I do believe that by recognizing this fault I was able to strengthen my paper overall.I make a good use of my sources but my own voice struggles to be heard, instead I try to let the facts I've accumulated do the talking. I think it reveals my strengths of having a good structure that logically follows my argument as well as supporting claims with evidence rather than assuming them to be "right" or common knowledge. I think it also reveals my weakness of not being able to review my own writing, even aloud. I spend so much time on it my mind unconsciously fills in missing words, or parts I "know" are there. I believe it also shows that I don't always know what exactly I want to write as there are sentences that appear to just be dropped in with no relevance to previous ones, because I had a good thought and don't want to forget it. Peer revision has been tremendously helpful in identifying these sentences that don't appear in the right context.
My third paper was easily the one I was most passionate about. What was surprising for me was that I had too much I wanted to talk about, all of it was not going to fit in to the paper. My problem was choosing specifically what to say. What I tried to do outside the classroom was look at articles on the subject either for or against the issue and determine what was relevant across all of them. What I personally identified as the important issues and talking points across all of them helped me limit the scope of my paper. I think this helped me a great deal bring definition to my paper. It also demonstrates my ability to soak in a lot of information about a topic and decide what is relevant and useful to my argument. I think this paper also shows a weakness of mine, in that I tend to slip between a casual and inflammatory tone as an author. While it may be useful in getting people upset about something, I realize I need to improve my tone to inspire others to action rather than contempt. I think this is something I'm always going to struggle with, as it is a reflection of my personality to not take things very seriously unless they are suitably upsetting.
Finally, my fourth paper was the one that I struggled with the most. I believe I struggled with this paper the most because of how vast the arguments for and against merit pay are. One example, that Cliff raised at my visit with him was how merit-pay can create a tier system where only subjects with empirical proof that student achievement is increasing are rewarded leaving teachers with more subjective classes like language or gym out in the cold. This is just one example of many, that I would need to research and indentify to improve my argument.I believe have significantly improved my writing from my first paper. There were not many revision notes about style or text being unclear, something which my first paper had quite a lot of. However, I clearly struggled with identifying what kind of rhetorical arguments to use on my website, and needed to condense my arguments to bullet points. I also needed to more clearly identify my audience, and suggest a call to action we can go about implementing.
I started this course with a very low estimation of my writing skills. While I don't think I'll ever enjoy or be particularly skilled at writing. This course has successfully helped me identify strategies such as peer revision, techniques such as invention exercises and clear a focus on where my strengths and weaknesses lie to help me write competently. I am extremely happy to be leaving this class with a bit more confidence in my skill as a writer and my understanding of writing as a process.