To be perfectly honest, writing was never one of my strong points in high school. I always dreaded the days that a paper was assigned. I can’t think of a paper that I’ve written that I’ve been satisfied with. I think this is because I never developed a good writing process.
When a topic is assigned, I usually wait until the day before it is due to start working on it. This usually causes me to panic and rush through the paper without doing any kind of planning before I start writing. My papers typically start off fairly strong, but depending on the prompt, I sometimes grow bored and just try to wrap up the paper as quickly as possible. This results in a noticeably rushed or incomplete second half of the paper.
In high school, I was rarely required to write multiple drafts for assignments, but when I was, I made very minimal changes between the draft and the final paper. This can be attributed partially to laziness and partially to simple ignorance. I was never entirely sure how to go about revising a paper. We occasionally did peer editing in class, but everybody just exchanged their papers with friends and rarely made any corrections.
I am trying to alter my writing process as I work on the crots assignment. Rather than waiting until the day it is due, I’ve been working on the crots a little bit every day. This is easy to do with this assignment because it is broken up into segments, so there are plenty of good stopping points and I don’t have to worry about losing my train of thought when I come back to write after a break. Also, because we will be turning in several drafts, I am hoping to improve my revising process.
You and I have the exact same writing process. I got away with it for so many years because I always managed to dig up something to write about and the paper would be decent enough to get an A. In my high school also, we never had to write multiple drafts, the teacher would just want the completed assignment. I would just write the paper and turn it in, sometimes never having proofread it after. My writing process has definitely changed though since I’ve been in college. I know the significance that each assignment presents and I make sure that I take everything as serious as it can be taken. I took ENC 1101 during the summer C session here and received an A and I have to attribute my new writing process to that. I hope it’ll work out for you too.
ReplyDeleteI'm trying to do the same thing. I had the same problems in high school and all my papers turned out bad but I'd get decent enough grades. Now thatI'm in college that doesn't work. You have to learn to manage your time better so you can write better papers. Over summer i started doing parts of my papers throughout the day. Pretty much if i had free time i would work on it and i ended up getting a good grade in the class since all of my papers were much better.
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