Perfection In Two Questions, By Lynda Collins

Critical Complexity When I heard Mr. Sabol announce the topic for W131’s latest assignment, an exploratory essay, I was furious. Of a world of scintillating and fascinating topics, he picked “writing” as the subject of the class’s papers. Writing, of course, was not my favorite theme; I felt the topic had been so overused over the course of the semester that writing any more about it would be futile and destructive to any shred of creativity the class had left. Furthermore, I had expected to be allowed to explore the topics that interested me the most outside of class[d1] . Regardless of my expectations, I had been stuck with an assignment I didn’t want to do.

I knew what people had said their personal reasons were, but I didn’t know how to incorporate that information with my own personal feelings about stories. It wasn’t until after the second set of peer reviews that I realized that just taking their comments, which there weren’t many of, into consideration, I needed to follow my own gut feelings about my paper; my felt sense. I felt like something was very wrong with it, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. If I were a more experienced writer, perhaps I would have kept writing, not until I had filled the required amount of pages, but until I had found the words that I was searching for.

I really just thought there are other aspects that are more important, but in the back of my head I was never happy with just an okay opening. The attention grabber needs to be intriguing and make the reader want to keep reading. Back in early high school and middle school, I was told your hook should be a question. I later learned it didn’t need to be a question it could’ve been an interesting fact or a clear image being told. Little did I know there are plenty of other ways to go about writing the hook and gaining the reader 's attention.

My strengths and weaknesses make want to become a better writer hopefully this class will help. I 've never been a good writer but then again not everyone is, my strengths push me and weaknesses pull me back but only with practice and help will the weaknesses be vanished. Being able to know what to write but not know how to piece it together is a huge weakness. It doesn’t sound like a huge problem but it 's more complex than it sounds. When I get an essay prompt and it 's time to type I know what I 'm going to writing about and how it

It looks good to me when I read it, but when I turn the paper over to someone else; they do not find the point I was trying to convey. Typically, I have to verbally express the meaning of the paper to them. This is the area in which I would like to excel in this class. Second, I have never really enjoyed writing. I just tried to make the best of it when I was forced to endure it.

When I first entered this class, I already knew that it wasn’t going to be easy just because I 'm not good with putting things into words and explaining myself with proper grammar. I can honestly say English 101 has really inspired me to be a better writer. This class affected me in a lot of ways it showed me that writing takes time and you can 't expect a paper to be great without any revising or editing. That has always been a mistake of mine, I would tend to free write a lot it seemed to be the only way I could get my thoughts processed on a paper. I would forget periods, commas and misspell words without even noticing.

Instead I should have been explaining why I thought writing did not need rules and why my past teachers might have thought that we needed these rules that they were telling us about. Also my quotes I used of Anzaldua did not really do my paper any justice, they were just kind of there. They did not make the connection I was hoping for, or the connection I was trying to make. I knew in my head what I wanted to say, but did not know how to explain it in words. But never fear my writing got better!

As a writer, I think that I am not as good as I thought I was back in high school. I see myself as a student who tries their best, but makes “B” average work. I have never really taken the time to relate to my papers. I always just wrote what the teacher wanted and handed it in. In my mind, I never really liked trying to explain in full detail what something meant.

When we started writing I learned that my main weakness was getting my point across while staying on topic. I have always struggled with writing, so when I took this class I knew I would have to improve on my writing. When we wrote our first essay in the class, I knew it was terrible. I was very nervous about turning in the paper because I knew that I could have done better but I was not sure how to get my point across and my paper still make sense. Luckily for me, Mrs. Garth was very tough but then again she was very lenient on us.

The thoughts running around in my head were telling me that this essay might be a little better than the pre-assessment. After all, Mrs. Robinson had proclaimed she graded harder to teach us, but there were still doubts in my head. Those doubts made me think to write something personal since that was what I was used to. Upsettingly, I spent time on this essay, but didn’t use all the resources to my benefit. A key part I didn’t use was reading aloud the essay after and going back and check to see if it made sense.