Relationship to writing

My Relationship With Writing

The DSP essay really points out my problems when it comes to writing. This is shown through my approach to the essay and in with in my essay it’s self.  I feel as though it was not helped by the fact that I was written in the middle of summer, which is the last time someone wants to be writing an essay. With the DSP showing some of my biggest flaws in my writing and if I think about theses flaws and combine it with some of my strengths in writing it can easily improve my confidence and my quality in my preparation and final product in writing.

One of the biggest problems of my DSP essay is the fact that I tend to procrastinate on writing my essays. I do not mind doing work; I tend not to procrastinate when it comes to things such as math, science and the humanities. But as soon as it comes to reading, writing and other things that I do not feel that I am strong with I tend to take longer to get started.  I think it stems from my low confidence when it comes to reading and writing due to my dyslexia. I believe I am a strong writer but I may not show due to the simple mistakes that I make when writing. I knew about the DSP essay for months before I even started considered writing that essay, then it took me another week before I finished the essay on the day that it was due. I even procrastinated on this essay, I started to do the essay and before I could even finish the first essay I was working on math homework. My procrastination has lead to me not having a ton of time for writing; editing and I end up writing my essay in one day. If I fix my procrastination problem I will help me write an essay that is not rushed.      

One of the hardest things for me is editing my paper. I am not a good reader so I make a lot of errors and I do not see them when I make them. This all stems my dyslexic tenancies, I just avoid letting others help me with my editing because I have been embarrassed by it my whole life. In the DSP essay I barely looked through the essay and only had one person look at it. For the future I would like others to be able to look and help me make changing things because I only let people critic my grammatical errors and I do not like when people try change my sentences. I feel as though that if I had more confidence in my writing I would be able to write better and allow for a greater amount of editing. I will have a lot of confidence after writing some things such as in my year journalism class my senior column was really good and my editors and teachers all thought it was really good and I had a lot of confidence in my ability to write but I am inconstant in my writing so that cause a low confidence.  

Organization is one of my biggest problems within my essay. The way I tend to write leads me to a lot of decent points that do not seem flow that well together. There are lots of different paragraphs that seem to be just thrown together. In my DSP essay goes from the cost of high school sports to my opinions on international testing with out a transition. This is caused by my lack of editing. I feel as though if I could just read my essays carefully and make more carefully and make the transitions and the paragraphs flow with my points. If I was better at editing my papers I believe that my organization would be stronger. My organizational issues are epically prevalent in longer essays. Length tends to get me off track. I need to develop a way to stay concentrated in essays that are longer than one or two pages. This really shows in the DSP essay, an essay that is five pages in length, because my points and arguments become more diverse and less centralized in the ending paragraphs of the essay. I think organization could be the most important to me developing as a writer.           

My writing also is not complex. I write short definitive sentences, and I am not very wordy. If I could develop a more complex vocabulary and stop describing things so concretely I would establish a stronger essay. I have had plenty of sentences in my DSP that could have been better if I just made them a little more exciting. “High school sports are an important part of American culture and the public education system as a whole.” That sentence is boring and needs to be “spiced up”. If you write an essay like you are making statements instead of making it an entreating essay it can defeat the purpose and loose the attention of the reader.  I have had this habit my whole life and I believe it is very important thing for me to try and break in college. If I can improve my writing in that way I think it will have a big impact on my writing for educational purposes.

My thesis’s my whole life have been weak. I have always not been able to write a strong thesis, they mostly have been just a main point of the essay instead of a thesis that is trying to prove something. The single most important part to a strong essay is the thesis and if I cannot write a good thesis it takes away from the essay in the first paragraph. My thesis in my DSP essay was “Athletics have such a miniscule impact on our educational systems, compared to the many more influential reasons why the United States is not excelling on these foreign tests”. This is not a strong thesis for a good academic essay there needs to be more power and confidence in defining what the opinions are, but my problem is that I can recognize that it is a bad thesis but I do not know how to fix it. If I could learn how to write a great thesis statement it could drastically improve the strength of my academic writing.

My conclusions tend to just summarize what has already been explained. If I could learn how to write a proper conclusion it would improve the end of my paper and the essay as a whole. My conclusion in the DSP essay was basically three sentences saying the same thing with the final sentence being “There is no real support to the idea that athletics hurt education, so if we really want to look at the problems in the education system, we should look elsewhere.” This is an extremely lazy conclusion. I blame this on the fact that no one has ever taught me how to write a proper conclusion.  While I do not believe that the conclusion is one of the most important part of the essay but a good conclusion can make or break an essay.

Overall most of my problems come back to the fact that I have no confidence in my ability to write an essay. I feel I could be a good writer but I always think that even when I something that might be considered good I automatically believed that what I am writing is bad even though it might not be true. This is especially true with the DSP essay because when I wrote it I thought that it was terrible and I did not know how I could ever make it in college with my Middle School level writing, but when I when I went back to read my essay I realized that it really was not bad. It confused me because I just remember thinking the whole time while I was writing the essay was how bad I thought it was. Even in this essay, in the first draft when the essay, the whole time I was thinking this was a terrible essay, and I will never make it in college. Then when someone had to read it and write a note about there opinions on it I just thought he is just going to think I am so dumb for writing this. But when I read the note he was very complementary and talked about how much he liked it. Then after class he told me face to face that he thought what I was wrote was really good. Even after that I still did not believe him, my first thought was “Really he thought that was good.” Looking back on it now I just think maybe it is good and my confidence in writing is just holding me back. If I just have the ability to sit down and write and not think that everything I write is a bunch of trash I think would make some of the most difference with my complex relationship with writing.

The DSP essay did show some parts of my writing that are not all bad. I feel as though that I am good at bringing out outside sources and connecting them to a point. This comes from my experience in journalistic writing. I also believe that I brought up good points and counter points to the writers essay. I believe bringing up good points and using outside sources are extremely important in writing a strong essay. It would be a pretty good essay if I had organized it a little better. I also connected the author to the essay very well; I tried to use the author’s opinions in as many paragraphs as possible with out it being over done. If I can put these points together with the things that I plan to work on to become a better writer especially if I can get the organizations and the conclusions down  

If I can combine the things that I do well in writing plus some adding some confidence in my writing I would greatly help me add to my writing as a whole. Its important that I have others help me with the stuff I cannot help my self. I really think using outside help such as Sweetland writing center and peers to help me can really help me improve my mistake I make do to my disability, which may also lead to a higher self-confidence in my writing. The DSP really help me take a closer look at my relationship with writing.