I feel that my confidence in my writing has grown significantly, and I’ve learned how to write even when I don’t feel particularly inspired. I really enjoyed the process of incorporating secondary sources into my essays, it definitely helped me develop as a writer and gave me a better understanding of the broader academic conversation between authors. Moving forward, I’d like to focus on improving technical aspects like grammar, spelling, comma splices, and MLA formatting. I also want to work on varying my sentence structures and experimenting with different techniques, since I sometimes fall into repetitive patterns.

I believe i grew as a writer, learned how to write more efficiently and stray less from the topic while staying relevant and knowing how to back up my claims with evidence. I learned how to analyze literary texts and find deeper meaning in texts and to use that and make my observations and thoughts of the texts accessible to others while conveying a broader statement about something larger than just parts of the texts or even the texts themselves, but about themes such as discrimination or society etc.

I definitely improved my organization skills, in my writing and in my thought process. My vocabulary has expanded a lot as well.
There is a lot I still need to work on and get better at. I think most prominent are my spelling and grammar (annoying that’s still a main issue but sadly it is) and my progression of ideas in fleshing out a thesis statement. More construction skills are also heavily required.   

My writing has gotten tighter and more deliberate. (I feel like if I ramble on, I will just be disproving my main point… but I will anyway.)The in-class writing assignments have helped me to take my time as I formulate my sentences, enabling me to be more conscious of the vocabulary, structure, and content I use in the first draft. Certain writing exercises have pushed me to develop my thesis statements further and dig deeper into my initial ideas. I’m still working on redundancy and repetition in my writing. I repeat too much (this time, on purpose ;).

I feel like my writing has improved a lot. Throughout the first and the second semester my writing changed in style and became more efficient, I used to write a lot of redundant things in my essays and the tools of this course helped me get rid of that. I learned to write more analytically rather than summarizing, and the more we practiced in-class writing the more I became experienced in timed writing.

The thesis statement structure “although/actually” helped me improve my thesis statements and make them stronger.

I think the one thing that really opened my eyes this course was the realization that you can write your essays in much more compelling way, by adressing the reader with questions and thoughts.

I still have long way to go, I still have grammer and spelling errors, my vocabulary isn't wide enough, and my writing is still messy and repetetive sometimes.

I've found recently that exploratory writing helps me come up with ideas and helps me organize my thoughts. I think this is a tool I'll be taking onward as I continue to grow as a writer. Additionally, I've worked on being more intentional with my word choices and sentence structure in order to convey complex thoughts. Coming up with specific synonyms has been fun for me. I think by doing this during timed writing exercises has given me more confidence in my decisions, organizational skills, vocabulary, and spelling.

Despite my confidence in the more technical side of academic writing, I still struggle with expanding my analysis by thinking through my ideas and fleshing them out properly. During timed writing exercises I often forget to sufficiently explain the points I'm trying to make which end up just missing the mark. I think that exploratory writing will help me remedy this shortcoming.