Introduction Essay: A Reflection of my experiences in WR 150 and how I felt I devloped as a writer. 

             When I began this class I was at the end of a three year break from academic writing. Since freshman year I had been focusing on condensing my writing and thoughts down to a few bullet points that could fit on single slide. During their sophomore year, all business students have to take a business writing class. They focus on how to get the most important details across clearly while leaving any extraneous information out. The idea is that if you are writing an email or memo most people don’t care about the details. The top two or three points need to be understood quickly and then the reader can decide for themselves whether to pursue further information, which would be delivered through a different format. It’s difficult at first to condense long news articles or business reports into a half page summary where only the most relevant information is presented. Coming to WR 150 it was like a similar process of learning a new style of writing all over again.

At the beginning of the semester I recognized four different goals that I hoped would improve my writing. I achieved varying success while also improving in other areas. My first goal was to improve my logic flow. I feel that the logic flow within my papers actually got worse over the semester. My first paper (paper 1) had a clear logic flow from beginning to end. But by the third paper, my writing had lost a clear line of reasoning throughout the paper. Whereas before it was sequential, now it was a little fuzzy in its reasoning and did not flow from beginning to end throughout the paper. While the actual logical flow in my writing worsened, I feel like my understanding of flow grew. Thus, I was able to recognize the lack of flow in my paper.    

            My second goal was to realize a conciseness in my arguments. During high school and WR 100 I had difficulty transitioning my thoughts into paragraphs. To remedy this, I wrote extra sentences that while lengthening my papers, didn’t actually expand on my central ideas. Having spent so much time during my major studies boiling down information to a bullet point or two, I was worried that I would revert to old habits. I wanted to make sure I was able to expand my arguments while remaining concise in my writing. In my (paper 3 outline) you can see how wide the range of topics was. When compared to the final paper, I believe I was able to do a good job expanding the more important topics, while cutting those that weren’t necessary.      

            I had troubles with citing through high school and WR 100 and resorted to using online citing services. Coming into this class I wanted to develop and understanding of the MLA citing method I had always used. I thought it would be useful to understand each part and why it was needed. In this class we used Chicago style citing. This did two things. First, I was unable to use online services for citing without paying for them as MLA is the method given for free. Secondly, it forced me to relearn a new style of citing. Even with the Turabian book, I always felt unsure with my citing because of the nature of online sources. With a print source, the different aspects such as publisher and such can be easily found. With online sources, some of that information might be missing or difficult to discern. The problem is that online sources so heavily outweigh print sources in the time needed to find relevant information.

            Lastly, I wanted to increase my ability to show the reader the interest or value of what I was writing about. I believe I was able to develop that somewhat in my (paper 1) and (paper 2) conclusions. In my (paper 3) conclusion, I feel I brought the topic to an important connection with modern business practices so I was pleased with that. Where I feel I failed, is in introducing that importance in the introduction and throughout the paper. Only a reader who knows they are going to read the entire paper would find the importance at the end. For those who might just read the introductions, I don’t feel they would take away the importance of what I was writing about for this class. It’s a given that the teacher is going to read my paper and perhaps someone specifically interested in my topic, but I don’t think a browsing reader would be grabbed by my introductions.

            One place I feel I developed unexpectedly was in my writing method. At the beginning of the semester I was writing how I always had, writing with a general idea and few drafts. By the end of the semester I had a clear understanding of the useful nature of a progression from an idea, to an outline, to draft 1, and so forth. My third paper incorporated this method fully and I will use it for any future writing I do.

            This whole course is centered on image or object analysis and I feel I really grew in this area. Coming in with no experience, one of the first articles we read, “Mind in Matter”, was really interesting in how detailed an analysis of an object. The different levels of looking at an object beyond just what it looks like really opened up the class for me. You can see this development in my visual analysis of the Eames chairs in (paper 2) and the (MFA report).

            Overall I think this semester helped me to recover some lost writing skills but I did not develop much further beyond where I was freshman year. I regret not taking WR 150 directly following WR 100 because I feel I was not able to fully take advantage of the progression through the courses. The challenge for me in the future will be retaining the skills I’ve developed in this course without actually doing any academic writing.