In perspective, I would agree with Sonia Sotomayor on her stance with their being a possibility of those who are naturally good writers. With the numerous amounts of times that I have witnessed my piers being naturally good at writing papers, sometimes they could write a five-page paper on an assignment weeks before it was due. In my case this is not far from common, I would not consider myself a natural writer. Yet, there is a difference, between a “good writer” and a “natural writer”; it is pretty simple in hindsight, there is no such thing as a natural writer. A good writer comes from practice, similar to how people can seem naturally good at a sport or any other sort of activity, it takes an interests in and it takes a diligent mind in order to take advantage of the situation. The ability to improve is only amounted to how much someone is willing to improve.
As a somewhat basic writer, my plan of action is in all terms, simple. First, working on the rough draft is done and I make sure it sounds good enough to be a final draft. Second, I would consult with a peer on how the paper sounds; specifically, how is the sentence structure and use of vocab. My main concern is repetition, too much repetition with both common transitional words and less common transitional words lessen its value and have the reader lose interest in my writing. The key to my reasoning for word choice within the papers I write is to make it not only understandable, but also to make it interesting. The choice of words I use is to make my work more individualistic, with this it makes the reader feel more inclined to continue and to find out what the phrase or sentence means. Yet, does this work all the time? For the most part, yes it does get me a passing grade, but the purpose of this effort is to achieve a well written piece of literature in order to grasp the full understanding of a good writer.
Many of my struggles with getting a good paper range from common misunderstandings with the assignment and the articles I must use for an assignment. When reading an assignment, normally I would go over it at least 3 or 4 times to make completely sure what the task at hand is. Although this problem is generally meant for a different situation, I believe that understanding an assignment is just as or even more important than doing the actual assignment itself. When it comes to the articles that follow in its steps, I have some points where I don’t even know what the article is about; typically I tend to have my eyes start to repeat the same sentences over and over again repeatedly until I stop myself and read over the article once more; yes that is the type of reader I can be. To solve this problem, I simply read with more closely and slowly so as to get a better understanding to what I am reading.
Besides these few yet major issues with my understanding of the intricacies of writing, my least common problem is still a present and typical issue. Repetition is good when you’re first starting off with writing yet doesn’t satisfy when you’re writing a more vivid piece, or any that is more detailed and formal to a professor’s specific specifications. Normally my issues range from using the most basic of sentence starters “the…” repetitively or I use a more unique approach to start a passage such as “therefore,….; yet…..; when…..” too frequently and sometimes with no reason but to not use “the”. In a sense, my problem was mainly with my lack of planning; something which I explained briefly earlier on. Of course, the essential element to creating a greater paper is with help from planning.
To become a good writer, manly as a student the majority of time spend on writing should be within the drafts, not the final draft, but the very first draft that you start off with. Many of your basic ideas that will be your main topic points should be focused during that time. When writing your first draft visualize all the information you have gather either through the readings you had to do, the experiences in your life, the information gathered through any documents that have been reviewed. Whichever source that is used make sure to use it to its entirety, that means quotations. Not only are quotations important when discussing the work of an author but also interpretation is a unique skill as well. Without the ability to interpret an author’s text then the use of the quotation is practically useless.
In life there are no naturally good writers, just those who are able to practice long enough to and review well enough to make their product come out to near flawlessness. The process of writing a good essay may only rely on a few very important concepts. Revision, this is something that we tend to drift away from, yet we know we need to do this. After we write our papers and hand them in what happens with that? Well the teacher revises it and puts the grade on it. So, if no prior revision is done before this then less errors will be seen by the teacher grading said work. Revising should normally be conducted within each draft and when finalizing your paper. This would include if you have multiple copies of your draft, no matter how many there are the possibility of a mistake is inevitable.
To summarize all that I have said in a sentence, planning out your papers are key to getting a good grade. In all of the articles that we’ve read for class, each one gave a basic understanding of each step within a planned-out process. Although each one was separate and unique in their own way, they all did point back to the basic planning process. The steps would most likely go: sketch out an outline for your draft, create your first draft, revise that draft, create a second draft, revise that and if needed create another draft, if not then go on to writing your paper; revise that one final time checking for grammar, sentence structure and word choice. This should be your basic plan of action; as a side note, make sure to have a peer review your work and see if it is understandable for them. When choosing a person, go for someone with little to no prior knowledge of the assignment so you can get a completely open opinion.
In conclusion, prepare and plan out your steps. As a basic writer, these steps given not only work for me, but have helped me numerous times in the past. These steps are also reassured by professional writers and back up by the articles in the textbook we’ve been working on. Writer’s block is a challenge to get through, but it can be remedied with this. As repeated multiple times, plan out what you want to argue or discuss about and make sure your peers can understand your point of view. The worst thing that can happen to a writer is the inability to know what to write.