When I was seven, I started reading chapter books. When I got into middle school, I started writing stories of my own. I think because of this, my strength in English is to easily get ideas and know what I want to talk about. I never really had a problem brainstorming what I wanted to write about for an essay, research paper, or leisure writing. To contrast this, my weakness is expanding my ideas.
I am good at getting the main point across, but fail when it comes to elaborating my points. This is okay if I, for instance, was just writing a simple five paragraph essay, but when I have to write something over two pages, I get stuck. I know what I am and should write, but how do I go beyond that to fit that page requirement? I know that in college there will be a lot of papers due that are way over two pages and I want to be able to write them.
There are four goals I hope to achieve by the time I am finished with this English class. The first is knowing exactly where to put commas. The root of this problem is me trying to identify dependent and independent clauses. I think a lot of people have a problem with this. It seems like a simple thing everyone should know but do not.
My second goal is to learn how to write an interesting introductory paragraph. I want to learn how to write something that hooks the readers hopefully by the end of the first sentence.
The third goal is to know how to make my work look professional. In my senior year of high school my English teacher told me my writing was 'childish'. I assume it is because I do not have an advance vocabulary as someone at my level should have.
The final goal I want to achieve is writing a conclusion without restating what I already went over. I still do fully understand what exactly I should include in my conclusion paragraph if we are not necessarily summarizing what we stated previously.
In all, I love writing, but sometimes it can be a little difficult for me. By the end of the semester I want to be able to smoothly write a paper without worrying about repeating facts I already stated. I want to be able to leave this English class with the skills necessary to help me with the rest of my classes here at Loyola.
K'Juana, I think you'll be able to achieve your goals if you are persistent. We will certainly work on introductions, conclusions, and comma usage. The best way to accomplish your other goal, expanding your vocabulary, is through reading. Read. Read. Read.
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