Due: Monday, August 30 (250-300 words)
Pause to imagine that one year from now your professor asks you to reflect on your recent growth as a writer, as well as to establish a list of writing goals for yourself moving forward. How do you think your future response to this prompt might differ from your response to the same prompt from our first day of class? In which ways do you envision your writing priorities changing between now and then? How do you anticipate your skill set as a college writer to develop in the meantime? How will you have improved upon your weaknesses? How will you have reinforced your strengths? How will you keep the momentum going?
Your posts should be 250-300 total words, which is about one page of writing: not a lot, but also not a little. Try your best to address the series of questions outlined in my prompt: in the case of our first blog post, I want you to deliberately and creatively imagine your potential for growth as a writer over the course of this next year. Be as specific and precise as possible with respect to your writing priorities, your long-term goals, and the concrete way in which your strengths and weaknesses may have changed over time, seen from the perspective of your future self.
If you envision yourself mending your weaknesses and finding new strengths, then I want to hear about which weaknesses and which strengths, in particular, and I would like to know as much as you can tell me about how you imagine yourself making those strides on a practical level. Put simply, I want details, details, details.
For example, here are a few framing questions by which to model your thinking,
- Will you have worked with tutors at the Writing Center to develop stronger topic sentences, with an eye on incorporating a clearer sense of focus in your writing?
- Will you have met with your professors during office hours to explicitly discuss how you can organize your the broader arguments of your research writing?
- Will you have worked with new college friends to better articulate your thoughts and to work out the main ideas of prose?
More pointedly, in the future, will the process of annotating with Hypothesis have taught you anything new about how carefully you ought to read and write in college? What about Blogs@Baruch? How might the practice of writing for a broader, more public-facing audience have impacted the way you see yourself as a writer? How might the course theme of imagined futures have prompted to more actively reflect on your up-and-coming identity as a college writer?
Be imaginative! The more inventive, the better.
Feel free to edit your posts after you publish them, if indeed you find yourself ruminating about the future of your memory as time carries on…
Entering this class, I’ve set for myself multiple goals that I hope to accomplish by the time I finish this course. Some goals I set for myself are to improve my writing style, grammar, and punctuation. I chose to meet these goals because I feel like my writing style and grammar is not where it needs to be and there is room for improvement. To better my writing style and grammar I plan to work closely with my teacher and tutors at the writing center. I think my punctuation in my writing is good but I can improve on it more. Another problem I face when trying to improve my writing is catching mistakes, I tend to not catch the mistakes in my writing, rather, I point them out in others’ writings. I hope to fix this issue by reading my work over and over again down to the letters until I find the errors. By using Hypothesis, I believe my annotations will improve over time because in the past I never really annotated anything I read unless I had to. Now with Hypothesis, it’s easier to annotate and find them when going over my notes. By writing on Blogs@Baruch, I believe will also help me improve my writing style because I’m writing in a place where others can read my work, and by knowing this I try to write my best.
I hope that by the time this class wraps up, I will have found a way to improve my general style of writing. There’s a high chance that all aspects of my writing could use some significant critique, but I feel as if I’ve left my writing style untouched for a bit too long. A big issue I face when writing is finding a beneficial attitude when approaching. It sounds a bit ridiculous but when I write, I always go back and forth between aiming for perfection to settling for far below what’s considered acceptable and never looking back. I try to strike a balance in between, but it’s definitely something that could benefit from some change. In the meantime, I hope to shift my focus from grammar and wording to quite literally anything else. While grammar and wording play a major part in the creation of good material, the extent to which I focus on it could be seen as detrimental at times. What I mean by that is; I’d like to stop spending 10 minutes trying to figure out how to phrase each sentence as I’m writing something. I consider my main strength in writing to be my understanding of basic grammar. In fact, I would say that for every piece of material I’ve ever written, each one has an 80% chance of being free of grammatical errors. Utilizing the resources at the college seems like something I should seriously consider, but at the same time why shoot for the stars when settling for mediocrity is also acceptable.
I think my future self would have new goals, therefore changing my perspective on what I look forward to when it comes to writing. I feel that my future response would have more direction. It would be catered to something I really want to invoke in myself. Push me closer to who I desire to be. To be able to look back and see the ways I have grown and all the ways in which I could still develop for the better is my goal. I can picture myself learning and evolving throughout the year to discover my writing style. I believe that I can overcome my weakness of detailing my explanations. Improving on my weaknesses will aid in reinforcing my strengths and further develop my writing skills. I will keep my momentum going by taking initiative in my writing by trying to push past my current limits and achieve a new level of writing for myself. I will use the writing center as a source to give constructive criticism on my writing pieces. The overall goal is for my future self to look at this prompt and think of everything she has achieved and how she achieved it. To look at how she conquered her writing struggles and turned them into strengths.