Writing has always been an issue for me, especially organized essays. Blogs and responses to other blogs are decently easy for me and I would guess they would be easy for everyone. I really enjoy writing what is on my mind on an issue and then reading the comments from others. It gives me confidence that somebody finds my writing interesting or debatable. Blogs are a great way to exercise your mind and even create better writing skills. My mom even created her own blog after I told her about my assignment in this class. She has been out of school for a couple of years and she sometimes forgets how to spell certain words, so I suggested to her to set up a writing blog. She now writes about her adventures in the desert with her horse, Cheyenne. Writing her blogs is helping her a lot, plus she shares her accomplishments with other horse friends so it’s rewarding for her.
Critical reading I am still having issues with so trying to write based on information in the text is really hard for me and takes a lot of my time. Those Critically Thinking questions have helped me the most in trying to understand what I read. I didn’t do so great on my second essay so I really don’t think I am really doing that well in this class and the timed writing essay confirmed it. My writing skills I don’t think have changed that much except now I get a lot more practice with it. I think I might have done better in an actual class rather than online.
My reading skills have changed a little; I now can read more effectively and know what I am reading for the most part. Frankfurt’s, “On Bullshit” confused me a lot and I had to read the book three times to get the just of he was saying absolutely nothing, which was my first impression about his book. I guess that I came to this conclusion tells me something, but is that something correct is my question? I guess that may be another issue I have in this class, self doubt!
I have had a lot of practice with my writing so far and I guess that helps me organize my thoughts better. Practice makes perfect, right? If I have to take this class over again I would definitely take it in a class, like I said above, and I would also take less classes with it so I would be able to concentrate on improving my skills more. These weeks have gone so quickly and I really not have a clue on how my writing and reading skills have improved at all. The best I could say is that is has been a challenge and there are a couple things I would have liked to feel more confident in by now. Let’s hope that I am able to gain better skills in these last couple weeks and am able to write a killer research paper!
Improvement in anything personal to us is a hard thing to achieve. I believe that improvement in writing is like improvement for any other things in our life. You know it is an improvement when you spent time on it and get good feed back from others. I do not believe improvement is achieved fast or easy. If you are able to achieve something fast and easy then it really is not that you improved but more like you were being lazy or bullshitting on your previous assignment.
ReplyDeleteI believe that all these English courses we are all taking are just training us on how to be a better writer for our own expeditions in the writing world. Once we have done our share of the blood, sweat, and tears (more like migraines, trashing of papers, and pulling out of hairs) we will finally be more than prepared to go out in to the world and be able to write something that is actually worth reading and may actually persuade someone to buy our works.
Not trying to brag, but I do not share your challenge in reading since I have been always naturally good at understanding text. I believe my understanding of text comes from my parents since I was normally watching very heavy things on television due to them, such as History Channel, various things made by Monty Python, and just very heavy intellectual shows. My issue falls under having to find out the teacher’s particular writing style that they prefer us to mimic and learn from them. It normally takes me one or two big papers to finally get the style that the teacher prefers me to write in.