Personal growth and audience awareness in academic writing

¶ … learning progress as a writer, but also my personal growth and experience throughout the course. I will be discussing what I believe are the two most important course outcomes and how I learned to apply them. Thinking back to the beginning of this class I was terrify and intimidated by the simple thought of writing an academic paper. After all, previous to this course, I did not have a strong writing background. The only experienced I had coming into this class was the one I acquired from my EN105 course, which I considered very basic knowledge. Because of this limited exposure to writing, as well as the fact I have little to no practice what so ever before college, I found the class to be extremely challenging. Yet, at the same time, this challenge motivated me to learn quickly and try to catch up as quickly as possible. Although I believe I still have a long way to go before I achieve a level of competence in writing that I would perceive as adequate, because of this class and the challenges that it presented have moved me much closer to that goal by leaps and bounds.

Reflections on Learning to Write

One of the first things that I had to learn when I was in the class was that the audience in which any piece of writing is directed towards is a critical part of the equation. I always thought that when you write it just kind of comes from within you and you can write down whatever you feel is appropriate. However, considering who the reader is and trying to consider their perspective before writing anything definitely makes sense on many different levels. For example, a business paper requires that the language be suited to someone who is in the business world and would expect a minimum level of professionalism in the writing style.

The paper on education that I worked on and is represented in my portfolio was also a paper in which determining the audience that would be reading the paper was also an important aspect to writing the paper. On one hand, I knew that the paper would likely just me read by the instructor and the people in my class, but on the other hand, as I was working on it, I was trying to imagine what a more professional version of the paper might look like. To me personally, I found it to really define who my audience would be. For instance, although I knew who would actually be reading, I kept trying to picture a wider audience that included people at different levels who might be reading it. Therefore, by reflection, the concept of defining the audience was one of the more challenging aspects of writing that affected my approach from the very beginning.

Beyond trying to get a frame together before I actually began writing, writing itself was a struggle for many different reasons. Another issue that I faced was trying to sketch out an outline to help me piece together my argument or the points I was trying to make in the papers. For example, when researching the role of branding in marketing to write a paper on that subject, each time I read a new book or article, my ideas for an outline seemed to become even murkier. For example, before I started I thought a fairly rough idea about what my outline might look like, but after reading a series of interesting points from different perspectives on the subject, my ideas for an outline became increasingly complex in my own mind and I had a lot of trouble trying to sort out some of the points that I wanted to include in the outline. In fact, even after actually writing the essay and going through a number of revisions to the original essay, I am still not completely satisfied with the outline that was used.

The revision process was also an interesting aspect to the writing throughout the semester. Although I never got to the point in which I was entirely satisfied with the papers that I wrote, it seemed as that if after each revision that paper received substantial improvements. I also found it extremely helpful to have as many people read it is as possible. For example, one of my friends who read the paper on marketing was only really able to make suggestions on improving the writing since they unfamiliar with the subject. However, another one of my friends with a business background was able to make suggests on the some of the content and make various suggestions on that level. Although I was insecure about my writing and did not really want my friends to read it, they were surprisingly supportive and their suggestions and insights really helped to refine the ideas that I was trying to present. Furthermore, asking for feedback prompted some really interesting discussions on the subjects that I researched which was also unexpected but definitely helpful.

After I was finally able to get a rough draft together on the papers I wrote, these drafts totally met the "rough" criteria. The original drafts had so many errors, including typos as well as many structural errors, that they were really hard to read. Also, since my outline was also still in the initial phases, the content was hard to follow as well. From this point it was really challenging to make these drafts more readable. I realized that I really didn't know how to use proper sentence structure to tie many of my ideas together. Furthermore, my knowledge about paragraph structures were also pretty limited. Thus, I had to review many of the things that I should have learned somewhere in my education previously, as well as learn many new things. However, by reviewing information about how to structure arguments and reading a bunch of examples, I managed to get a better idea of the things I needed to do.