Self Assessment
Being a skilled writer is an essential tool to have in order to progress within society. Your writing skills demonstrate your capability to observe and analyze projects as well as incorporate your own voice. Writing is an important part of communication, which allows us to express our ideas in the written word. Over the course of this semester, i have noticed that my writing capabilities have vastly progressed and I have learned to look deeper within a source of information and study the impact certain issues have on our society or conduct research on certain fields that are unknown to specific audiences.
Within the start of the first semester, we dove into the topic of proper research and intended audience. The intended audience or the “target audience” should be easy to determine based on the style of writing the paper was made. When analyzing certain articles for our discussion board responses I noticed some articles were broader to appeal to a wider less intuitive audience while the latter had diagrams charts and detailed descriptions using key terms unknown to the common reader, and they both spoke of the same topic. The technical description was the first test to gauge what kind of writers we are and how to appeal to our intended audience. This technical description asked us to write a clear guide with a depiction on how to use whatever object of choice. I had chosen something quite familiar to me already which was a piano. I’ve noticed now that my writing when I first started this semester was repetitive and seemed to lack further development within each sentence, as well as many grammatical errors. From this point, I was able to determine what areas of my writing I needed to work on and improve from that point.
The second paper was an assignment to strengthen our critical thinking and analytical skills. We were to choose a scientific controversy that is present in our world today and learn how to use scholarly sources to acquire our information. During the time of the approaching assignment deadline, we were given multiple tasks on the discussion board to help us look at perfect examples of good peer-reviewed articles. This was important to my writing skills because it helped men look into more reliable and scholarly sources instead of the ones we normally use in other research papers. Specifically, peer-reviewed articles which have the information verified by other board members and approve this release of information to the public. The topic I had chosen was nature versus nurture and the impact that each has on child development and who we turn out to be in the future. This essay is where I’ve mostly seen great improvement within my writing skills as I was able to provide sufficient evidence about each side of the topic and significantly used paraphrasing instead of direct quotations, which allowed me to interpret the meaning of each article and use my own voice to translate to the reader.
Over the course of this semester, I have come to understand the importance of developing my writing skills in order to overcome bigger challenges in the future. Writing is the expression of your thoughts and ideas and interpreting information in order to reach your target audience effectively. This is an essential skill to have for conducting speeches and debates in order to have a greater impact on the minds of the people. I believe my strengths have arisen from being able to properly paraphrase an article and making sure I have proper citations for each. What I believe I still have to further improve on is my research skills and knowing what information is useful or meaningless, which will help further reinstate my thesis. The improvement I have made in this class will have a significant impact on my future endeavors.
