My Writing Evolution

I think I have definitely improved in my analytical writing since freshman year.  My greatest challenge last year was connecting my evidence and commentary back to the thesis.  This change just came through practice, and I got better quickly after realizing what was expected from an analytical essay.  I also have improved at writing good thesis statements that address the So what? question.

I need to work on being less wordy and in general being more concise and not taking many pages to express one idea.  I'm better about this when given a word limit, but when I'm free to write however much I write, I feel like I end up writing too much.  Also, I need to get better at writing quickly but retaining the same quality of writing.  When crafting a take-home essay, I can spend hours thinking about what the structure of my paragraphs will be, and each paragraph takes me about an hour to write, if I am doing my best work.  I would like to be able to write well while finishing an essay in 1-2 hours rather than taking an entire night...

When I write an essay, I basically go in order from introduction to conclusion.  First, I think about the essay question and get a general idea in my brain about what I will be arguing.  Then write the introduction except the thesis.  At that point, I brainstorm, for hours sometimes, about exactly how I want to structure my essay and what I will argue in each paragraph, and I write an outline for each paragraph.  This outline consists of my topic sentence, and a few bullet points about what I will argue and what examples could be relevant.  Then I write my thesis.  Afterwards, I jump into writing the paragraphs.  The whole time that I'm writing, I'll get ideas about a good idea, quote, or phrasing that I can include in a future paragraph, and I add it in to the outline for that paragraph.  When I think of a good phrasing for some idea I have, I don't want to forget it, so I write it down; oftentimes, I can end up getting sidetracked for a while writing about some idea for a future paragraph.  My conclusion sometimes ends up being a page long, or longer, because I have so many ideas for it while I'm writing my body paragraphs.  One unique thing about my writing style is that I don't follow the conventional process of writing a rough draft, then going through and editing.  If a sentence isn't perfect when I'm writing it, I'll sit there and keep rephrasing it until I'm satisfied.  So, I end up with my "rough" draft pretty much being my final draft.  I later read it over, mostly to delete or add sentences or rephrase further, but much of my editing is done while writing.