At the beginning of the semester, the class was asked to write a reflection answering four questions: What are your strengths as a writer? What are your weaknesses as a writer? What are your reading and editing strategies? What is your experience as a writer? What do you hope to take from this semester? The following was my reflection on myself as a writer. Every thing that I mentioned in this reflection has in one way or another appeared in my other works in the rest of my portfolio.

I have always felt that writing is not my strong suit. I often struggle to even begin writing things like essays, because I don’t know where to start or how to articulate my words – honestly I sometimes even lack the motivation. However, once I find the right words to start with, I tend to go over the word count and instead face the weakness of not being concise. Some strengths I hold are that I enjoy using transitional words, phrases, or even sentences, because I like to make my work flow. Additionally, I like to explore with creative styles of writing like letters or made-up stories, full of imagery.

When it comes to reading and editing strategies, I need to work on them more, because after I write an essay or a writing piece of some sort, I do not usually go back and edit it. I read it over to check for spelling and grammar, but never to see if I wrote too much or too little, not do I edit its content. My experience as a writer has been purely academic. I have written research papers and essays for school, lab reports for biology, chemistry, and physics, and poems for creative writing assignments. This semester, I hope to take a lot away from this course. My goals are to improve upon my editing skills- to help both myself and my peers- to strengthen my ability to write thesis statements that eloquently reflect my stance and main ideas, and also to learn more about the different types of writing styles available. Overall, I am aiming to continue growing and improving my writing skills by learning more about my writing style- both my strengths and my weaknesses.