My Writing Goals and Action Plan

I have to work hard on organization and sentence fluency, but my biggest weakness is fleshing out ideas into words. I’ve always had this problem. Each year I think I get better at it though. It is important because language is how we communicate. I want my language to match my thoughts, so it is easy for people to understand.

I think this might be the most important post for me of the portfolio. I’ve learned a lot about what happens if I do not consistently work hard at composing words on paper. I get into a bad place. So, goals are going to be very important.

I want to keep building the skills I have been improving so this summer, as I read, I will use immersion reading, and I will annotate. I will practice my dictation and typing skills so that it does not take so long. I think that is part of the problem, the physical slowness combined with trying to get ideas into the written word. Each week, I want to practice making a claim and using the standards list we used for Purple Hibiscus. I want to start with my own…

1.      Produce clear and coherent writing in which the development, organization, and style are appropriate to task, purpose, and audience.

2.      Analyze in detail how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text (e.g., a section or chapter).

3.      Write informative/explanatory texts to examine and convey complex ideas, concepts, and information clearly and accurately through the effective selection, organization, and analysis of content.

4.      Develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on addressing what is most significant for a specific purpose and audience.

5.      Write routinely over extended time frames (time for research, reflection, and revision) and shorter time frames (a single sitting or a day or two) for a range of tasks, purposes, and audiences.

6.      Run Grammarly before I submit!

7.      Improve Making Claims!

…but take it from there and work on others.  I want to be prepared to do well next school year.

Finally, I want to continue to regrow the joy of words I have been rediscovering. I think I will write some poetry.

My Strengths as a Writer

       My biggest strength is my creative ideas. There aren’t always the most creative, but they are still curious, out of the ordinary, and unusual. Sometimes, I try and pick the simplest of ideas so that I can and try to squeeze as much stuff out of it as I can. Once I tried writing about just potato chips; I had a bit of trouble near the end, but I enjoyed it.

My Purple Hibiscus videos and my poetry are the best examples of my creativity. In my videos, I tried to choose a new theme each time. I tried to pull all the information from the chapters we read under one umbrella that might not be obvious, like the letter, C.

In my poetry, I used: anaphora to create a flow so that when I broke the flow, it would have more impact, imagery and cacophony for the audience to feel the harshness of color, and enjambment to pull the audience forward to the next line and to emphasize the noun. I also used anaphora to lull the reader into the consistency, assonance, and consonance to create unity with the rest of the poem, and rhyme scheme to create a sense of simple innocence.

I hope to continue to develop my creativity within the writing standards I need to apply.

What I've Learned and How I've Improved

I have learned a lot about myself as a writer this year:

I learned that I do not write like many people.  I have improved this by accepting my differences and learning how I do write. I think I could even write well if I keep figuring out and doing what works.

I learned that writing begins before the first word goes on paper. If I am writing about something we read, then writing begins with how I read it. No matter what, writing for me, begins with letting the idea float for a while before I even consider putting it in the written word. 

I learned that writing is a multiple step process. For me to write at high school level, I have to add and edit. -Numerous times. Not in one day, but once a day for a few days come back and flesh it out more. 

I learned this does not mean I am dumb. It means I am different. My writing style and my thinking ability are different things.  I have to keep working on how I write, but I have to work even harder not to lose confidence in myself.  

I have improved a lot, but I think it started a mental place, not practice or a skills place. Now, the practice and skills are what will get me where I want to go with words.  

Oh, and I learned that I say, “really” a lot and I have improved by saying it less.

Self-Portrait as a Writer

It has taken a long time to begin to figure out me as a writer. I think I am just starting to now because I think I started to give up for a while. I’ve always tried to write the way it seems everyone else does. I finally realized that doesn’t really work for me. For example, if I were to follow the portfolio suggested timeline, the quality of my writing wouldn’t be very good.  This is how I write best:

First, I must read the assignment a day or two before I start writing it. I break down the directions and the rubric into individual steps and put that into the document. I go ahead and format the document, too. It is best if I don’t write anything else yet, but if I have an important idea then, or before I start writing, I can put in a bullet point or two.

Then, when I come back to the assignment, I dictate the whole thing into OneNote trying not to stop and edit all the mistakes it makes as I go. I find this hard because I want to edit every time I see a mistake. Most dictation programs do not understand me very well, but OneNote does best.

Next, I copy and paste what I dictated into Word and clean it up. This step is important because Word helps me in ways I tend to skip. It has a thesaurus, “spelling and grammar,” and word count. 

The next day, I edit: I edit and add that day. Then I come back the next day and edit and add some more. By the third day of editing, I have a pretty good product.

Finally, I use Grammarly.  There are usually many suggestions.

It is odd because this is opposite of how I want to write. Honestly, I find each of these steps very hard because I want to do it all at once. For me to do well, though, I need a minimum of three days. That is okay because most assignments with many points give more days to prepare.

It is funny that we call it “writing” because the worst thing I can do is pick up a pencil and write it on paper. I have always been stubborn about trying, even when I paid the price with grades or disappointed people, until my grades just kept getting worse. I think of it as composing now, not writing.

I think I will continue to figure out me as a writer because I am curious again about what works best.  (Oddly, it does not take nearly as much time to write a song or a poem. It is not faster because they are fewer words than paragraphs, it is just that the writing flows better somehow.)  Even more, I think I will continue trying to figure it out because I am beginning to feel proud of my work again.