Semester Review

It became easier

Throughout the course of this semester, I’ve gone through many ups and downs with writing. After graduating from high school, I thought I was a pretty good writer. I took college compositive my senior year and got really good grades, so I wasn’t that worried about writing in college. Well let me tell you, I was knocked down a few pegs my freshman year of college. Now I think I’m an okay writer, but I definitely do struggle a bit. I took this class to fulfill requirements for my communication minor, and really I don’t plan on being a journalist, but I did learn skills in this class that will help me with writing in general during my future career. 

            I’ve learned how important non-biased writing is and how damaging biased writing can be on both the article and public opinion. When writing news articles as a journalist it’s incredibly important to double and triple-check that sources are very accurate and fair. Overall from class I’ve also learned how to properly interview someone and skills that help to keep the interview professional. 

            Writing doesn’t come easily to me, and it usually takes me a little while to think of how to start or what to write about but once I do, it becomes easier. Because of this class and the writing assignments every week, its become somewhat easier to be creative and would say I have less trouble actually getting in the flow of writing a piece. 

Being more particular, I learned that even when I read through my writing I tend to not notice certain grammar mistakes that make a full sentence illegible. I’ve learned to read my writing out loud, and also let another person read it to be sure it’s going to be understood correctly. 

When critiquing my work, I’ve noticed a few things I still really need to work on. Without noticing, sometimes I can be very wordy in sentences that could be straighter to the point. I still have work to do when finding my writing voice. When writing opinion articles, I show some aspects of my voice, but in other types of writing its very sparse and there aren’t really any indicators that make my writing unique. I’m still struggling with understanding how to find my voice more. 

This class helped me evolve by making me more aware of aspects of good writing and things I need to work on continually.