Alex's New English 1 Blog

Something that needs work is my punctuation. I know that I don't have the greatest punctuation because when I run my work through grammarly it always tells me that I need commas or semicolons. This is important because if I have a lack of punctuation not only will I be rambling but it could also contort my ideas into ways that they are not meant to be. Another one of my weaknesses is my lack of confidence in myself. Not only as a writer but as a person in general. I feel that the reason my work has not been as good as it has in previous years is one because of the level of hype that these assignments got and because I was not exactly sure that I could do it.

Most of my strengths as a writer are from the level of deep thinking that I do on the daily basis. If allow myself to just let go and then proceed to just write whatever I am currently thinking about well then I will do just that and it will be a decent writing. Another one of my strengths is my word choice and how it allows me to really get across what I am thinking. I like to try and really get across what I am thinking and I am not afraid to say what I actually think. Which I think is another one of my strengths. I am not afraid to try different things or state my actual opinion on things. I know that this is a touchy subject but it interests me as a writer to see how people respond to my work.

What I learned about myself as a writer that if I give myself enough time to actually think about what I am writing it turns out easily ten times better. For example if I do what I do over the summer and give myself an hour a day to write rhymes if you will they often turn out pretty alright. I also learned that I need to have confidence in myself if I am going to be a good writer. I cannot writer something that is to the best of my ability if I myself don't feel like I can write this.  Something that I learned about myself that is on a lighter note is the fact that I actually really like writing about hard hitting things. For example in a study hall before break I wrote three pages about the meaning of life. Granted it is completely opinionated but I feel like it shows what I believe in and I like showing that in my work. I want to be able to write about something that I feel strongly about but I don't want it to be something that I really don't care for.

I am a writer who is all over the board in traits if you will. I am both a person who loves to write but hates to be limited. I am a writer who wants all the freedom he can have but I want something that gives me the general idea of what to write about. I also am a writer who isn't hesitant to completely start over if it is not up to my par. For example this blog is a completely different one than the one that I started Monday.  I love being given a topic to write about and just being allowed to run with it. I am a writer that if given all of the freedom in the world would just sit there trying to think about what to write about until they decided to write about everything in the world that they could think of.

My trip to the writing center in the second quarter was very helpful to my revision. My writing fellow was Tanner Morgan and my focus was the fluidity of my writing and connections. I focused on my fluidity because I know that sometimes I can go on rants in my writing when I don't intend to do so. However this isn't always a bad thing that Tanner pointed out that it helps when I have writers block that it spurs the starting of new ideas. He suggested that I change the introduction to my personal narrative because although it was a good intro it didn't connect to the rest of my paper thus the focus on connections was made. The writing center in general is a love hate place for me. I love the help I get there but I also hate the feedback I get because it shows me a super hypercritical writer what is wrong with their work which sends me into a spiral of insanity. All in all I would say that it is more beneficial if you can just accept what they tell you and use it to better y...