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Alexa Lopez
Prof. Stephen Topf
English 114B
1
st
May 2014
Self-Reflection
As a writer the skills and tools that we have, we were not born with . As everyone else in
this world we learned over time how to improve our writing and our grammar skills. We grew up
learning how to combine words to create sentences, as well as how to revise our work in order to
improve it to make it the best we can. In high school, when it came to subjects I always tended to
do better when it came to my English. It was a subject that I felt comfortable with, and although I
may not have gotten straight As on every paper I still felt content with the way my paper was. In
my opinion, the process writing signifies obtaining a collection of ideas, topics, words as well as
reflecting on what we have learned and seen and formulating that into a paper. As a writer my
papers always tend to be better when I am given a topic that I am comfortable with and feel
strongly about. Even though there will be many times when this will not be an option, putting the
best efforts into every paper no matter what subject or area of writing is something that I have
learned this semester in college.
When it comes to writing every writer has their own personal strengths and weaknesses.
There are those who are better when it comes to narrative papers, others tend to do better when it
comes to research papers. Each becomes a writers own signature trademark when it comes to
writing. When it comes to me, my signature type of paper I am best at is descriptive and
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Narrative. Narratives seem to come to me naturally, my wording choices and the way I structure
my sentences in my papers seem to improve significantly than with any other form of writing.
Although I may be good when it comes to narrative and descriptive papers, my weakness tends
to be in Expository writing. When it comes to expository writing it never turns the way I hope. I
have many ideas floating in my head and I have an idea of what I going to write about in my
paper however I can never put it into words. My wording and my sentence structures always tend
to lack and not go into the direction I had envisioned in my head. This is an area I wish to
improve on due to the fact that it is one of the most popular forms of writing not only in school
but as well as in the working world.
Though it will be challenging to improve my writing in these areas, practice and exposure
to more forms of these papers will be the only way I can better strengthen these areas. There are
many ways to improve ones form of writing, whether it is from studying different techniques,
peer reviewing, or even looking at scholarly papers and documents in order to try and understand
why specific authors use certain techniques in their writing. Self-Reflection is the best technique
I can use In order to improve my writing; I believe this is the best way due to the fact that
reflection is a core component to writing. While this is important, maintaining and understanding
what I already know will also be crucial. Knowing what needs to be improved but as well as
knowing what one does right is important to obtaining the perfect balance. In an article called
Ongoing Self-Reflection by Ellen-Marie she describes Therefore, the better we know
ourselves, the better we can know and be helpful to others. Knowing what we need to do in
order to better ourselves is not only beneficial to ourselves but as well as others. What is the
point of learning new techniques if you forget those that actually improve your writing,
eventually it becomes a cycle. Eventually it will become difficult to help other with their writing
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due to the fact that we cant even improve our own. This is a reason self-reflection is a core
component to writing. Though there are many papers I have done that I wish I could change, the
papers I have done recently in my English 114B class are the ones I would improve.
There are two types of papers I would revise over again if given the chance, my Project
Text essay as well as my Project Space essay. The Project Text essay required us to read the
novel The Postmortal by Drew Magary which is about a pre-apocalyptic world that has
discovered a cure for aging and the consequences that comes with the cure. We had to write an
argumentative essay that explores an issue in the novel and describe how it develops throughout
the story or describe the books stance on the issue and find current media sources and describe
how the worlds view is on the issue. I chose to discuss about anti-aging since it is what the book
is about and as well as something that we are currently today trying to obtain.
The main thing that I would change in my paper is how to stray away from summarizing,
in the majority of my papers I tend to summarize throughout the entire essay and only analyze
about 10% of it. In order to improve it I would need to add more research and learn the
difference between analyzing and summarizing since this is an area in which I struggle in. I
wouldnt change my topic but simply rephrase my essay because my ideas are good its just that
I tend to stop too early so my essay never fully develops. If I had the chance to do another draft I
would go to the Learning Resource Center and get help with my essay, another persons opinion
might help me look at my paper in a different way. I would also give myself time on the paper,
since I tend to do everything last minute so my papers arent that good, they end up just turning
out to be a combination of random words that make absolutely no sense thrown onto a piece of
paper. I believe that giving myself plenty of time, rephrasing my sentences, and as well as
analyzing would improve my paper significantly.
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The second essay I would revise if given the opportunity would be my Project Space
Paper. This essay required us to choose two separate places that are technically considered the
same and discuss the similarities/differences in terms of the people that go there, the way it looks
and as well as the expected behavior and values between the two. As with my last paper I waited
until the last minute to start my essay, although I knew this was an issue for me and as hard as I
had hoped that I would finally learn my lesson and actually attempt to do my essay early I
became lazy and put it off. The problem I have with this essay is not with my essay that I wrote
on the contrary, this I believe to be one of my best papers. The one thing that I am not happy
about is the fact that I personally feel that I could have done a much better essay but due to the
fact that I put it off it wasnt the best it could have possibly have been if I had managed my time
wisely.
After Reflecting on my writings that I have done over the past semester I believe that
everyone can improve their writing. As described in the article, Ongoing Self-Reflection by
Ellen-Marie Silverman, ongoing self-reflection enables us to be maximally helpful to clients
and caregivers while we skillfully navigate our own lives' passages (e.g., Murphy, 2007). This I
believe to be true even in writing, Self-Reflection allows us to help not only others with their
writing but it as well helps improve our own. By reflecting on what we did wrong and what we
need to change, that enables us to better improve ourselves and our writing. One badly written
book or paper from an author does not reflect the author as a whole. Everyone is going to have
papers that arent as good as others that they might have done in the past, but that does not mean
that the author is a terrible writer. Every person can improve their writing in many ways, by
practicing over and over, learning new techniques but I believe that one of the single best ways is
by self-reflection.
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Works Cited
Silverman, Ellen M. "Ongoing Self-Reflection." American Journal of Speech-Language
Pathology. American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, Feb. 2008. Web. 1 May
2014.