Self-Assessment Blog

Writing is a fundamental piece of English. As a college English major I have to write many essays and responses. Being able to understand the material being analyzed is key; however articulation and grammar in the analysis is even more important. Understanding the material and being able to put your examination of material into words and essays creates an excellent writer. Personally I have a few problems in my grammar and mechanics when writing essays.

The first problem usually begins when I try to write a rushed essay. My grammar and ideas become sloppy. When ideas in an essay become unorganized it affects the grammatical portion of the paper. A sloppy idea causes the grammar and sentence structures to suffer. When I write a procrastinated paper I often find that my sentences do not help the main idea and often do not flow. This confuses the paper because each sentence seems to be written on its own without any relevance to the topic of the paper. Usually I can find such mistakes after I proof read my paper, but I think it would be nice not to make such errors in the first place.

Another mistake I tend to make in writing papers is word choice. For the most part I do not have much of a problem figuring out which words and tenses to use in my sentences. The words ‘choose’ and ‘chose’ however always confuse me. I can’t seem to grasp the difference and meanings between ‘choose’ and ‘chose.’ I find myself mixing these two words up constantly in my papers, or conversations.

Continuing on with problems I have as a writer I come to the conclusion that grammar confuses me. More often that not I follow my gut instinct and find that it is more or less correct. Although I must confess I have never yet used a colon in any essay I have ever written. I know that they are used for listing things, but other than that I try to steer clear of them. Also since looking at grammar at a sentence level I find that I may have been using semi-colons wrong for my entire college career. I also use the word ‘however’ extensively and don’t exactly know how to punctuate it properly with comma’s.

Essentially I steer clear of colons, am confused about semi-colons and comma’s around ‘however,’ and always mistake ‘choose’ for chose.’ These are just a few grammatical errors that I hope English 326 will enable me to fix. I hope to eventually feel confident in using colons, semi-colons, and comma’s in any essay that I might write. I would also like to be able to keep my sentence level structures to the key point, while using, properly, ‘choose’ or ‘chose.’ After this semester I would like to see my improvement in understanding grammar and sentence level structures.