I’ve never considered myself a good writer, but I have always enjoyed writing. For the most part, whenever I wrote alone or for fun I had no trouble letting my thoughts flow onto the paper. But now as I’ve grown up, and especially since I’ve begun college, I have realized that any writing is a powerful thing that can affect people. This realization has motivated me for the first time to truly work on improving my writing and learning new skills, which ERH-101 has helped me to do. When I began the course, when I wrote academically I still wrote in the standard cut and dry high-school method. I used the same five paragraph structure that had satisfied my high school teachers and filled my entire essay with fluff that I thought would check off each box on the grading rubric. Now, coming to the conclusion of the class, I feel I have improved my writing significantly, but haven’t changed my writing style much at all. The few tips we have been given, and the insight into professional writing by a professional writer has educated me on a very meta level. Writing about writing, as I am now, has given me a whole new perspective.
My writing has noticeably improved in two areas. First, my thesis statements are more direct and aggressive then they were before, which makes my writing more guided and focused. It helps prevent me from straying off course and going on tangents, which I am fond of. I notice it more now as a reader as well, I can tell when a thesis makes a defendable or provable claim and thus can see the effect it has in structuring the rest of the writing so that it is easy to follow and process. Second, I tone myself down a lot less. The big lesson I have taken away from the last paper and its associated readings is that no matter what we do our personality seeps into everything, especially something as creative as writing. When I tried to write academically or ‘neutrally’, as I thought it was, it just came out bland because of how detached and uninterested I was. So now, after four mouths of class, my thesis statements have become more direct and my writing has become more personal.