Process Journal 3

I believe my weaknesses as a writer include I guess I would call my random thoughts and trying to leave them out of my writing. My next weakness is still the researching process and last would be probably citing, but I think that has gotten better with my last essay. As far as becoming aware of them, I realize something else every time I reread my essays, which I guess is a good thing that I keep learning as I do it. I think that I am improving every time I write, which I think is important to always keep getting better when we write because who is the perfect writer?

Fundamentals of writing are probably my strong points. I feel like I write my papers well as far as the content, grammar and punctuation. Of course I always have things that need to be improved which I think should be for everyone. I think another strong point is my organization of my material, well it is organized, it may not transition well, but I am working on that!

As far as how my writing has been over this semester, I think I had a moment of brain cell loss at the beginning..I have been writing APA style for nursing for so long that when I switched over to MLA again it was like learning it all over again. That's okay, I enjoy MLA much better than APA any day! I think my writing is improving, and I really appreciate all of the resources that we get in class! They help out tremendously and are much better than the books we had to purchase for this class.

The conference was very helpful to me. I had never done that before with an instructor, and I think it was a good idea since every student is at a different level and it is hard to help each one individually with specifics, and that way we all got to address our own concerns with you and got to hear your suggestions for improvement. I hope to continue to improve not just through this semester but forever.

I had a good idea of what I wanted my thesis to be, but I had to narrow it about three times. I still think it was a little broad, but I think that my paper supported my thesis. My paper did have a lot of information and details in which I hope it didn't sound too complicated, but it was on a topic that is true to me and that I am pretty knowledgeable about so I wrote it as if the person reading it didn't understand anything about it and I also described each aspect of my thesis in my paper which I learned that we needed to do last week.

I enjoyed the Me-Search part of the essay as far as using an experience or something we were familiar with to help write the paper, but I was still a little unsure exactly how much we needed to put in there or if I was doing it correctly. As far as incorporating documentation into the essay, I personally don't care for it, I understand that it has to be done, but I like to write, but it is hard for me to search for research material and incorporate it into my paper and then the proper citations and all of that gets frustrating sometimes especially with the book that we have it is difficult, not very user friendly. I wouldn't say that it adds a level of complexity to MY papers, I think personally it adds some confusion because when I get to writing and then have to stop and add in my information from my research sometimes I don't feel like it connects well or it sounds out of place.

I also had a hard time with the library periodicals and finding what I needed from that. Everything that I pulled up showed the detail of the article but when I went to look at the full text, it wouldn't pull it up or print it out....very frustrating, I also had trouble finding something to relate to my subject. So on my 2nd draft I have 3-4 sources, but I still cannot get my library stuff to open correctly or print correctly so that I can see the full text version. So I am still having difficulty with that.

I am not totally satisfied with my essay at the moment, I know I need to add more sources from the library periodical stuff, but I also felt like I was telling a story with this me-search idea. I did have one opposing thought in there, but I am not sure that is really what you wanted or not.

I know I can write and I have always done well in all my English courses, but I feel a little out of sorts with this class. I enjoy Mr. Stalides and everything he provides to us, but maybe I feel somewhat "thrown to the wolves" but hopefully we will have things a bit more clear after this week. I am glad we get to have our conference to discuss everything the week when we come back.