To create a quality piece of writing, an author is to follow a wide range of strategies and adhere to some rules. To an inexperienced writer, this can feel like a rather exhausting practice. However, this is also an exercise that provides the training necessary for this individual to gain experience, develop useful skills, and memorize the most important points and aspects that make their writing easy to read, sophisticated, and captivating.
Throughout this course, I have had plenty of such exercises developing my reading and writing skills. This paper is a reflection on the reading and writing experiences I have had during the course, the biggest challenges, the perceived personal performance, and ideas for improvement.
Looking back at the essays I wrote throughout this course, I feel dissatisfied with some of my choices of strategies and expressions. I feel like I let myself down as a writer by failing to communicate my thoughts skillfully and comprehensively. As my essays were reflections and analyses of various readings, I got to learn how important the reading aspect was for my work. For example, writing about the article by Norland about Kurdish forces in Iraq, I noted that the author “uses a variety of vivid images and descriptive text to create a more personal perspective on the process”.
This was an observation made while reading the article, but I failed to provide enough examples, thus leaving this statement unsupported and weakening my writing. The employment of various reading strategies for the achievement of certain goals was one of the learning outcomes for this course. Doing my rhetorical analysis of Norland’s text, I focused on the content too much instead of providing a critical evaluation of the techniques and strategies used by the author.
The learning outcome regarding the application of reading strategies was practiced once again in my essay focused on the article by Nicholson about the famous athlete Billie Jean King. That essay was intended as a reflective analysis, and I attempted to tie its content to some general social phenomena. For example, discussing the lack of balance in attitudes to male and female athletes and sport performances, I noted “Of course, many things remain to be done as the world of sports is still unfair.
Women still get less money. Female sports receive less attention. Female leagues are even regarded as less professional than male leagues.” This way, I tried to add weight to the article’s content by showing its universality and timelessness. At the same time, I still see that the essay lacked critical thinking and looked more like a summary than analysis. Practically, having focused mainly on the attentive and thorough reading of the article selected for my essay, I managed to produce many interesting thoughts on the matter. However, it turned out to be quite challenging to integrate them into my essay.
In part, I believe the drawbacks of my writing to be inflicted by the weaknesses of my reading. Specifically, I tend to focus on the content of reading while missing out on the writing techniques used in it that could serve as helpful tips for my analysis as well as my work. One reading strategy that could help address this problem was notetaking. Discussing notetaking, Newkirk states that the “job is to give the page a close reading and mark word choices, sentence patterns, images, dialogue—anything… effective” (10).
Such an approach could benefit my analysis and critical thinking essay. Unfortunately, I neglected this strategy while working on some of my essays. I am a person who always has a lot to say, and this is supposed to make me a writer able to create interesting texts and express original opinions. However, due to the lack of organization in my work, the multitude of ideas that appear during reading become either confused or forgotten because I have not taken time to write them down.
Additionally, since I had trouble expressing my thoughts using standard written English, I believe that engaging in slow and focused reading as a leisure activity could also boost my self-improvement as a writer. Regarding reading, Whalen notes that “Slow readers list numerous benefits to a regular reading habit”. The author emphasizes the importance of reading as a tool for self-education, concentration training, and vocabulary enrichment.
To sum up, during this course, I faced challenges while creating essays focused on the analysis and synthesis of readings. To improve I need to practice writing as well as reading. The latter can help me improve my analysis and self-expression strategies. I will use the mistakes I made throughout this course and the problems that I faced as valuable lessons that will guide my further growth and development.
Works Cited
Newkirk, Thomas. “The Case for Slow Reading.” Educational Leadership, vol. 67, no. 6, 2010, pp. 6-11.
Whalen, Jeanne. “Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress.” The Wall Street Journal. 2014. Web.