Final Reflection

Final Reflection:

            As I began my journey into the last paper of the semester, thoughts from the past occurred in my head: the lack of description, the incorrect structure overall, the lack of forward movement, the unclear sentences and the unclear thesis statements. All of these were problems that in present time I believe I have improved. During the span of this class I have made good progress, and evolved my writing into one of higher caliber. Even in some processes as drafting, where the paper is yet to be refined, one my see that the overall structure is clearer and sentences more concise. To be honest, some challenges are harder to overcome than others. The sentence by sentence clarity was easily overcome and so was the lack of forward movement. The big problem was the overall structure. I was completely unaware that the body paragraphs, just as the paper itself, have an introduction, a body and a conclusion. This gave me a hard time. This is not merely a question of rephrasing, but quite possibly one that might end up changing your essay completely. The new gained flow allows for the ideas to have a slow, and steady forward movement. This is about the time when I discovered that everything had to do with the structure of the paper and that once corrected everything would clear up.

             Lack of description refers to the paper missing certain qualities that would allow the text to explain itself better and more thoroughly. More so, it is the lack of some background information for the reader to understand the paper's argument. Such things as summarizing the events, changing them into my own words, not quoting the text or even not giving background at all greatly affect the quality of the paper. The reader must be able to know what he is reading about before he is submerged into deep analysis of a piece he knows nothing about. Academic writing is not about taking things for granted, but about creating a solid base that will firmly prove and sustain a point. This was something I failed to do in the last two papers, but has become one of my main goals in this last essay.

            Now, about the structure I believe that the slow progress has proved to clear that up. Every paragraph has a clearly defined start and an equally as clearly defined end. The movement of the paper is backed up by an order specified by the structure of the paper. If one fails to create this order efficiently, then the forward movement will be affected as the ideas instead of being directed through a funnel to narrow down, they are expanded everywhere due to disorganization of ideas. Also, one needs not to generalize the conversation once you have gone to the specific because it just stops the forward movement of the essay and instead creates a counterproductive rewind of topics already discussed. This in specific was the problem that gave me the hardest time because you really have to move stuff around, even re-write completely certain parts to be able to make sense and create a nice flow and forward movement in your essay.

            Such a problem as unclear sentences may affect the quality of your writing greatly. If sentences are unclear then the message that the sentence attempts to portray is also unclear. This is probably the most important aspect of my writing I needed to refine. This involves translating ideas from my head to the paper; not only that, but to translate these ideas and be understood by other readers. This problem had a very easy solution. I stopped trying to sound smart and limited myself to use everyday language, which I dominate, to more clearly express the ideas I wish to portray in my paper. As I once learned from a writer named Ernest Hemmingway, simple words can be as effective as or even more effective in some cases than complicated words. Furthermore, it is a known fact that some of these words we may not have 100% control of their use and in attempting to use them we may use them incorrectly thus making the whole sentence confusing and in some cases even make the sentence capture new meaning; thus abiding to colloquial language did not seem like a bad idea as I attempt to make progress in my writing and not to burden it more with unimportant things regarding style more than anything else.

             Another problem I intend to improve is the lack of forward movement. This is due to the repetition of an idea in various different ways making it seem aesthetically different, but equal in content. The root of this problem is in my attempt to create a longer paper. Eventually one might run out of ideas. In an attempt to create what seems like new ideas, one may erroneously begin to repeat them. This repetition, in turn creates a counterproductive loop of ideas were you start at one point, fail to move forward and end up at the same place. Consequentially this becomes a problem of the argument; the lack of ideas does not give enough solid ground to substantiate your claim, thus making your paper useless and obsolete. Only those papers that can keep this forward movement are effective in academic writing. This problem I believe has been in slow progress throughout the papers; also, I think this problem is mostly due to my lack of description. Lack of description fails to create enough background for one to develop upon thus consequentially leading to lack of ideas which ultimately leads to their repetition.

             All in all, I believe more progress can be made in my writing. This skill takes time to improve and a couple of months in this writing class are just not enough. Hopefully I will continue to improve my skills even further in life. Probably what helped me and bothered me the most was hard criticism from my peers. It helped me because I was exposed to my flaws allowing me to correct them; it bothered me because all of my life I have believed I'm a good writer and thought I had nothing to work on. I embraced the bad news and worked on the papers; after all, one cannot expect a teacher to breast feed you all your life. Criticism is hard in the real world, might as well take it from someone whose purpose is to make you progress.