Blog 10

Rachel Sharer

During high school, my writing process was usually selecting a topic, researching the topic, writing my rough draft, peer reviewing, and then revising my final draft. This process was more out of requirement than out of personal favor. During college, I have grown into a new process. While in some classes, like this one, I still turn in a rough draft and a peer review, I am not necessarily required to do that for other classes. Therefore, my process changes depending on which class I am writing for. The basics of my process remain the same, except now, I have a little more creative freedom on what to write about and how I go about my writing. Now I research serval topics first before selecting which one to write on. I also am able to write throughout the week for a lot of my essays rather than only really working on my writing during class. I took a creative writing course this semester, which ended up being my absolute favorite (unsurprising considering creative writing was one of my motivators to becoming an English major). For my creative writing course, I was able to go through several creative processes like looking into specific formats for poems and coming up with character names. I enjoyed this process more than any other because it usually consisted of me, in the middle of the night when I am most motivated and creative, writing in my bed about ghosts or murders or love, which are more entertaining topics than something like leadership and reflections. I think through finding my own creative processes, depending on what type of essay I am writing, has really strengthened and reassured my stance as a writer. I feel as if I am coming closer to creating my own style everyday, and I find it easier and easier to start a paper now. I have improved on being confident in my words and writing more clearly. I have also improved on being more comfortable with my writing. I do not dread long writing projects, I am excited (for the most part). I still know I can always grow even more as a writer, and my process can grow as well. I can find my style and use my style to my advantage. I can also improve on using more rhetoric in my writing. I always knew of the rhetoric tools, yet I feel as if I have rarely used them to their fullest potential. I think the projects we have worked on for this course have definitely helped improved my rhetoric skills, and I can only look back at this class as a reminder that I can also use those newfound skills to improve my writing even more.