You may assume that the writing SOL is difficult and stressful. You might also think that failing it is inevitable. Although you may be nervous, various skills can make the SOL be less of a challenge. By planning, writing, and revising your essay; your fear will disappear.
First of all, planning your essay is important as it provides you with a list of ideas. You can use these ideas to make a graphic organizer, which will help you to form paragraphs later on. Also, a graphic organizer will let you know what needs to be done with your essay. What I mean by this is, you will know which parts of your paragraph need to be completed. In addition to making a graphic organizer, planning your essay assists you in the creation of your thesis statement.
When I was required to write my first essay, I was so nervous due to the lack of confidence I had in
When writing a five paragraph essay, there are five steps one must fallow in order to attain perfection, these steps include understanding the question, brainstorming, writing a rough copy, revising, and creating a final draft. The first and most important step is understanding the topic. The topic of the essay is what the essay will be about and if this is misunderstood, the whole essay will be off course. The second step, brainstorming, will help organize thoughts and ideas so they flow amiably. There are many different ways to brainstorm, some of the most helpful are making a web of ideas, making a list of ideas, or creating a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the conviction. All these ideas will be related to the topic at hand. For example, if the essays topic is about how the earth is affected by global warming, then the brainstorming ideas might include the ozone lair being reduced or how global climate has raised. The third step when writing a five paragraph essay is creating the rough draft. The first draft must have all the features the final will, but does not have to be...
When I read “Proficiency” by Shannon Nichols I really felt for her. I understood and resonated with her story perfectly, especially when she stated “After I failed the test the first time, I began to hate writing and I started to doubt myself. I doubted my ability and the ideas I wrote about.” (83). After I failed my writing assignment I was so embarrassed and didn’t want to write again but obviously, I had to. I always doubt the things I am going to say or which order I am going to organize the essay in. I try so hard to make sure all my sentences are cohesive and all my ideas connect to each other and the main concept but sometimes it just seems that when I keep messing with one little sentence or paragraph I just makes things worse.
The strengths in my writing are my organizational skills, grammatical construct, and my work ethic. Organizing an essay is a very natural process for me. I always follow the basic guidelines for the structure of an essay, which state that one must have an introduction, thesis statement, body, conclusion, and a works cited when needed. The “Are Helicopter Parents Entering the No Fly Zone?” essay, “Animal Cloning—How Unethical Is It?” essay, and the “The Clean Water Act—Is it Successfully Reducing Water Pollution?” essay all have a proper introduction, an informative thesis statement, a body, great conclusions, and works cited pages. Formatting the essays is an integral aspect of organizational skills. Each new paragraph is indented, the font is twelve-point Times New Roman, the sentences are double spaced, and the headers are correct.
Over the years of my schooling, I have gradually developed my writing preparation to help me become a better writer. I continue to find ways to improve my writing abilities by working on my weaknesses and by incorporating the feedback I receive from my peers and my instructors into my essays. At times, I still struggle when preparing to start my essay, but with precise and organized planning and obtaining the help of others, I am certain that I will become more proficient in my writing
When I am assigned to write an essay, the first thing I do is panic. I panic because I always seem to run into the same problems with my writing process. I have no central idea. I have no clue what I actually want to write about. When I was younger, I always started by making a web or an outline because thats what my teachers encouraged me to do in school, but I don’t do that anymore. Now I sit in front of my laptop, I take a deep breath, close my eyes, gather my thoughts, and type. I just let my thoughts flow onto the page. When I don’t feel the pressure of writing to an audience, my writing is completely different than it is when I am writing something that I know my professor or peers will read. As I am writing this exact sentence, I don’t quite know where I am going with it. My writing process is unorthodox and unorganized, but it is what I do everytime. When I stop trying to follow the linear model of writing, explained by Nancy Sommers as the process of forming an idea, writing about it, then revising afterwards, I feel that I am more capable of discovering something meaningful within my words. When I am forced to write a thesis statement and base my paper solely on it, it doesn’t come out as good as I think it should. It decreases the potential for my ideas to grow and discoveries to be made. It limits me to a single statement and narrows my thoughts, preventing me from discovery.
However, when it came time to write the essay, I was confronted with my old enemy, writing. Writing and I have a history, I have never enjoyed being in the presence of writing, due to its both mentally and physically taxing requirements. Despite our deeply rooted feud, there are times where I cannot simply dismiss writing, and generally with help such as guided activities, exemplars, and therapy; Writing and I can put aside our differences for a brief moment of time. One example of this is in my argument, In the beginning sentence I feel that I was able to reach what was expected of me by created a strong counter argument and quickly proving it wrong: “Some might argue that if an individual has grown fond of an illusion, then why wake them from that joy? Now, that is a fair point, but as we see in the book, if they wake up, they realize how unhappy they truly are.” As I face more and more of these assignments where I am forced to implement writing, I grow more accustomed to the process. Writing might not be my ideal major, but I understand its importance. While I dread typing a 5 page essays, I know they are coming. Better I struggle know and learn than struggle later and
At the college level, longer essays and academic writing require more thinking and analysis. After reviewing my information, I have numerous ideas. The key is to choose the best ideas for my writing. Once I have chosen my ideas, I decide how I will present them or in what order I will give my information. At this stage in the writing process, I use an outline. An outline is the skeleton of my paper; the structure of what I will write about. Within my outline I have the introduction, thesis statement, supporting ideas, and conclusion. In the beginning, my outline consists of few words per bullet. This way I do not confuse myself with other facts; strictly my ideas. For example, if I was writing my paper on an author of southern literature, my outline would consist of these bullets: introduction, history about the author, literary works written by the author, analysis of the works, and a conclusion. Once I have organized the structure of my writing, then I am free to add the “flesh” to my outline. Outlines are essential to my writing process. By forming an outline, I can clearly see the path of my writing and the order in which I need to write it so my audience understands what I am trying to convey. Soon after organizing my ideas, I can begin
Writing has never been my strong suit. I’ve always been more of a math girl. I just feel math comes easier to me, because in math there is one solution to a problem. It would be less frustrating for me if there was a clear formula in writing a perfect essay. I feel when assigned an essay I freak out on how to make it seem smart enough and clean it up enough to at least a “B” essay because I know getting that “A” is a stretch. The most frustrating aspects of writing for me are writing the hook, the thesis statement, and being my own worst critic.
As a writer, my greatest strength is to layout the essay as introduction, body and conclusion and especially thesis. In EAP, I was taught carefully in this regard, the construction of introduction, a thesis is the main factor because it is the main point of the essay. However, arranging ideas and put them into sentences are not my strong. For example, in the essay, there were a lot of ideas and arguments that I collected and I put them randomly in paragraph...
Essay Plan Purpose This Essay Plan has been developed as a concise and informative plan to guide the readers in creating an essay, breaking down the parts of an essay, guiding the reader how to plan the essay, What is an Essay? An essay is a piece of writing on a particular theme or subject, generally, from the author’s point of view.
The main reason why I have so much trouble when writing, is because I don't concentrate
My first writing weakness was deciding what to write about. I had to read the essay topic over and over again to understand what it was asking for. I would worry that I wouldn’t understand the topic correctly. While writing the essay I was scared to get out of topic and write about something else I wasn’t supposed to write about. Another thing that would happen to me was that suddenly my mind would go blank and wouldn’t be able to think about what else I could write about. The essay I liked writing the most this semester was the second essay. I enjoyed making my own planet and how my alien had a quest with all the commercials I saw on the TV. The hardest essay I wrote this semester was the fourth and last essay. I got confused when I was writing the body paragraphs. This writing weakness impacted my life by showing me that I have trouble thinking about how I could write my essays. I think I should start reading books and maybe I could get a few ideas out of those books.
Hey, are you stressed? Well so am I. Unfortunately, stress consumes us all whether it’s because of academics, careers, family, friends, or other things. There are plenty of ways of reducing stress and even getting rid of it. Although stress can be seen as a bad thing, it is also good since it helps an individual prioritize what’s important due to the amount of stress felt on a certain topic. For example, this paper increased my stress each day it came closer to being due, so it was prioritized for me to do to help reduce my stress. Stress can also be seen as bad since it can inflict on a persons’ physical health, and lead to rather rash decisions like sleep depriving ones’ self to finish an essay or study for a test. That leaves the question is how can one reduce bad stress, and keep good
In the past, I used to start writing an essay without writing an outline. I even did not brainstorm before I began to write. As a result, my essays were undoubtedly messy and disorganized. For instance, after I finished writing my Paper 2, I asked my professor for suggestions. He advised me to rearrange the order of paragraphs since my essay was disorganized and disordered. At that moment, I finally realized that if I did not plan out what I was going to write, my essay would be less likely to be logical because outline is like a base and foundation of an article. Hence, I started writing an outline from then on. For example, I nowadays would like to write my thesis statement down first. After that, I will briefly write down what I will talk about in body paragraphs. After using pre-writing skills and techniques, I notice that my essays are much more organized; and thus, my essays are no...