Writing Biography

My greatest strength and deepest weakness would be the quest for the perfect score at the end of the process. I was raised with the expectation of perfect scores. Anything less was not acceptable and I would lose privileges until those scores were back to perfect. I let this need for perfection drive me. As a result, my writing for academic purposes is the absolute most difficult thing I have to withstand during school/college. Every time I write a paper on a subject that has little or no interest to me, I struggle to not let that show in the work. Those papers are the ones that I sometimes cry over because I am so sure I'll miss that elusive A. Difficult papers make me think about how I need to push myself to learn more about the world around me so I don't have to try so hard. When it is a paper on a topic that I like or enjoy reading about, I can usually fly through it and I feel energized because I know I just completed a really solid paper that would provide a perfect score.

My greatest challenge within the writing of academic work, is the need for citations and evidence to support my ideas. I'm always afraid of being accused of plagiarism because I didn't cite something accurately. It is not like they made that an easy process. They keep changing the rules and depending on the program, the expected format. During the application process to get into this program, I had to write a ten page paper because I didn't have anything already in my collection that met expectations. I spent over four hours just making sure I had accurate citations in the text and that my references were in the correct format.

The pieces that I most remember was a comparing and contrasting symbolism paper on the first day of college and the paper I wrote...

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...at has twists and turns that make me think and wonder, but I have never managed to make that possible for my own work. The few times I tried, the stories were flat and not at all engaging. That lead to the realization that my purpose is not writing great fiction, but reading it.

My goal in academic writing is to get comfortable with the process of working with ideas that are difficult to grasp and putting my ideas on paper for someone else to read and understand. Lamott (1994) said, “The person may not have an answer to what is missing or annoying about the piece, but writing is so often about making mistakes and feeling lost” (p. 163). I am tired of feeling lost when writing about things that are difficult topics for me. I'm hoping the help of peer responses and pushing myself into new thinking, will enable me to no longer feel lost and allow me to reach my goal.