Monday, February 3, 2014

Summary reflection

English 250                                        
Matt Beth

In my Portrait of a Writer essay, I wrote a lot about how I thought my major strengths were in narratives and poetry. Since a summary is clearly neither of those styles of writing, I was very skeptical about starting this assignment. I’ve never really been a huge fan or writing academic pieces, especially one’s where I couldn’t include my opinion at all.
I think in general, I completed the assignment well. I believe I got all the criteria into the essay that I needed as provided an informative overview of Alan M Jette’s article “Diagnosis and Classification by Physical Therapists: A Special Communication”. Were I to be able to add my own thoughts and stance on the topic, I would have been able to drive a stronger argument and generate more to write about rather than adding “fluff” which I feel really diluted and diminished the quality of my essay.

I know we have plenty of other academic writing left for the rest of the semester and I can’t say that I’m really looking forward to them. However, after writing the summary, I have began looking at these future pieces as more of a goal, rather than just work that I have to do. I have seen where I struggle and get frustrated in writing academic texts and it is now my goal, as the semester moves forward, to fine tune and correct the parts of this writing style that I struggled with so much while writing our summaries.

1 comment:

  1. This is great analysis of your own writing process and needs, Matt. I'm curious--if you're willing to talk about it, what ARE some of the areas that frustrated you in writing the summary. I'm asking because I bet you're not the only one, and it would help me teach this assignment better next time if I knew what some of the potentially frustrating issues were.

    I'm glad to hear you are looking at the future assignments as goals. I know academic writing is not fun for many people, but knowing how to do it will help you be successful as a student and out in the real world. Hang tough. :-)

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