I have a lot of habits when it comes to writing. Some good, some bad, some depend on the assignment. For example, when I outline my essays, I would micromanage the whole essay. This is a good thing and a bad thing. It is good because I know what I need to write in what order and etc. which saves a lot of time. However, it is a bad thing when I need to be flexible when I find something new I want to put in. I did this type of outline for my very first English assignment in my college career. The assignment was a literary narrative where you write about your own experiences with writing, reading and learning these skills, and how those experiences have shaped the person you are today.

This is one of my body paragraph outline about my relationship with writing:

Which turned into this which is taken from the first draft:

This version of this paragraph incorporates another habit of mine which I was taught: do not use the word “I.” Throughout my writing career up to college, I was taught to never have my voice heard within the work unless explicitly told to do so and if so I must do it as little as possible. As a result, most of my literary narrative were written like this, where I barely used any pronouns. However, after an individual writing conference with my first-semester English teacher and a class discussion on “Can you use ‘I’,” I changed the voice used in the literary narrative that was more appropriate for the assignment.

It became like this which is taken from the final draft of the literary narrative:

I had conflicting feelings about this final version because I felt like it lost its professionalism and became more informal. However, this tone of voice is more befitting for this assignment and made it much easier to write. There was an inconsistency with the established tone throughout the first draft of that assignment which caused the paper to not flow as smoothly as the final draft. Using this informal tone and first-person voice in educational writing was foreign to me and this new experience helped me in future assignments, like my self-evaluation reflection for project 1, rhetorical analysis.

Project 1 Self-Evaluation & Reflection

In project 1’s self-evaluation and reflection, I used an informal voice and wrote less technical aspects and more personal aspects about the paper. This helped me communicate the flaws within the assignment and possible reasons why such flaws exist. However, I realized some of my comments on the paper are my old habits resurfacing. For example:  

The highlighted is an example of how I compare my paper to my old way of writing where I focused a lot on the structure of the paper. I usually write in chronological order if possible for smooth transitions, but in project 1, I formatted the paper differently which made me feel something close to how I felt when I changed the tone in the literary narrative. However, like the literary narrative, the change was beneficial toward the assignment. This weakened the belief that the one writing style is the perfect one size fit all, for although it does get the job done, it doesn’t always do the best job. However, old habits die hard. For example, in project 1, the rhetorical analysis paper, I went to my default mode of writing when I was having trouble.

Project 1: Rhetorical Analysis

As said in my self-evaluation and reflection of project 1, I wrote a paper closer to a literary analysis than the assigned rhetorical analysis. Many reasons contributed to this happening:

However, what this piece from project 1’s reflection is essentially saying is that I resorted to my default mode due to trekking through unknown territory. Which could be translated to me surrendering to the traditional norms which I was taught is always the answer. Although I do have a difficulty of going back to my old habits when writing something new, I have tried to change my way of writing with areas I am familiar with. For example, my project 2, the research-based argument paper with annotated bibliography.

Project 2: Research-Based Argument Annotated Bibliography

For this paper, I originally structure the paper to be similar to my research paper in the first semester of college. This paper was about if the SHSAT was unfair and was outlined like the literary narrative, thoroughly. As a result, there was very little flexibility when writing it resulting in it being written in a certain way where multiple sources were used in one paragraph. For example,

This made the paper more of a bunch of facts said in multiple sources and stringing them together. It made it have little to no room for analysis of the argument and sources, unlike project 2 where each source had its own paragraph with little to no intervention of other sources. This created an opportunity to analyze the source and point out flaws or reliability within it. For example,

This paragraph talks about a potential solution for the topic of the paper. After a brief description of the possible solution, there is a short analysis of how unlike the other solutions, this one changes the nature of consumption of knowledge. Then, there is a counter of a potential issue with this solution, supporting a previous argument that was made.

However, although this showed how writing differently can have benefits, there were also drawbacks as shown in my self-evaluation and reflection of project 2.

Project 2 Self-Evaluation & Reflection

Although this was written with my old writing standards in mind, like project 1’s self-evaluation and reflection, it has some valid points. For example,

However, even with these flaws, I still wrote a solid research paper by writing in this structure and it helped decide the details of project 3, the re-mediation of project 2.