Portrait of a Writer

            I think that I am best at creative writing. I am good at creating a story in my head and putting it down in writing. I am not very good at summarizing things or analyzing them. I like to write things that I would want to read. I love reading nonfiction, but anything on a serious topic that I am not interested in isn’t going to happen. It is the same thing with my writing. If I am not interested in the type of writing we are doing or the topic it is over, than I will have a very hard time writing it. A good example of this was one day in physics class our teacher made us summarize a science article. Most of the articles were really boring and hard to read let along summarize. I struggled with trying to finish this assignment. This can lead to several other problems. I either don’t make sense, I ramble through several different topics, or I repeat things frequently. I am also good at writing speeches and summarizing articles for speech. It helped that most of the articles were over things that were at least sort of interesting since we didn’t want a boring news/radio show. Usually these were on topics that I enjoyed, but not all of them were enjoyable. They took longer than my creative writing though because I wanted to get everything just right and I wanted them to be really good. I also have this problem that if we are supposed to analyze something and I don’t understand the reading or the assignment, I make things up. I started this in high school because I decided that I would rather turn in something horrible than have it be late. I also hate going back over things that I write. I have three problems with this. First if I do it too early than I get caught up in fixing things and I don’t finish what I am trying to write. I also get distracted when I am typing if those lines appear under words that says they are wrong which leads me back to my first problem. I big example of this happening was when I was in Creative Writing class and was working on this semester long story. I never managed to finish it because I kept going back to make sure it sounded write and I was punctuating correctly. My last problem is that I am horrible at figuring out what is wrong with my writing or anyone else’s. I have hard time remembering where commas and things go and don’t go.

            I frequently suffer from being distracted while writing. A lot of the time it is grammar and making sure that my sentences sound alright. I also spend time trying to figure the difference between certain words like effect & affect and then & than. I am better at this than I used to be, but it still can be hard for me since I still am not always sure what context certain words are used. I also am horrible at limiting my sentence length and my paragraph length. I am not always where I should turn one sentence into two. I also am not always good at judging where I change topic and create a new paragraph. For the longest time my stories were just one long paragraph. I don’t have that problem anymore unless it is like a paper or something where there isn’t any people talking. I know when I am writing a story that I should start a new paragraph when someone new talks which makes it much easier than say a research paper.

            I am horrible at preparing to write a paper. I am the worst at preparing research papers because I haven’t had that much practice. I think I did one or two research papers in high school. It was pretty easy then because we always had a long time to do them and there was due dates for each section. We would turn in our research at certain time, our rough draft at a certain time, and our final draft at the end of the semester. I also had a hard time getting the appropriate number of pages for the research paper. I had a big problem with this my senior year when I wrote a research paper on genetically modified organisms. I had to do a lot of extra research just so I could get a seven page paper. I also sometimes have the opposite problem. If I am really passionate about something I can go on forever. I have done this twice when I was giving speeches. I had a speech for speech class on a TV show I like that was supposed to be about seven minutes long and it ended up being about twelve minutes long. The other speech I did for leadership class and it was supposed to be between ten and fifteen minutes long. It turned into a twenty minute speech. If I am really into a topic than I feel like everything I find is important and it HAS to be in the speech. So it’s a good thing that a get passionate I just need to work on toning it down so I can edit it better. Overall I think my writing could just use a lot of work and I actually think that this paper just helps prove that fact.