Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

Dear Andy,

College Writing continues to challenge my writing abilities. My first reflection was mainly about my past as a writer before coming to this class, along with my Unit one paper. I was very happy with the end result of my unit one paper, and was ready to go on unit two. However, unit two proved to be a completely different assignment than unit one. While they were both related to identity, it was hard to transition my writing style. In Unit One I was able to tell a story, which is my favorite thing to do as a writer, but this paper was focused on defending an argument. Instead of describing a person or place I was defending arguments. I have obviously written papers defending theses, but none had seemed as complex as this one.

I wasn't sure if I even bought into the idea of differentiating “claims” and “summaries” when the unit was introduced. The idea made basic sense but it seemed to me that some summary was necessary in defending any claim about an article that had been read. The first draft of my paper orchestrated my lack of understanding of the concept. I had put in a lot of summary, and while I had made a claim, I had apparently not done much to defend it. My second draft, however, I completely redid the paper trying to put in all the advice from the professor: it seemed like a legitimate paper. The teacher agreed that the material was good, however, something that was also a problem in Unit one came up again in this draft of Unit two. The organization of the paper wasn't at it's best, and I was once again too wordy.

While the organization thing I'm hopeful to fix, I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to fix the wordiness of my papers. I love to talk a lot, and when I write all the words in my head come out, and it's a lot of them. I like to give essays human qualities, even if it's supposed to be an official argumentative document, and I feel like this hurts me. See, I could've just said, “this hurts me” in the previous statement, but I threw in “I feel like.” This is exactly what I mean. I'm a conversational guy, even when I'm writing and all I'm doing is having a conversation with myself in my head. Even when I'm trying hard to write papers with as little words as I can, they just work themselves in there. I'm not sure if I'm ever going to be able to fix that entirely, but I'm not too worried about it. I could still make a career writing for standup comics with a lack of organization and clarity in my writing.