Strengths, Weakness, & Goals

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 strengths in english is to easily get ideas; know what I want to talk about. I never really had a problem brainstorming what I wanted to write about for a 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 expanding 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 expand it to fit that page requirement? I know in college there will be a lot of papers due that are way over two pages so I want to know how to write them.

There are four goals I hope to achieve by the time I am finish with this english class. The first is knowing exactly where and where not to to put commas. 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 of mine 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'. If this is true, I should work on improving my writing style so it can appear professional.

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.