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.
It is now 5 minutes before I’m supposed to leave to go to campus and I realize now that I did the prompt completely wrong. My bad.
I liked your goal to improve your general style of writing because I often find myself imitating authors’ or others’ writing because I still haven’t perfected finding my own style. I think this is important because your style of writing differentiates you from other writers and it allows you to truly find your writing voice. Grammar and other writing techniques, once you learn them, are easy to utilize in your work but in the end, the voice and style of a written piece are what makes it stronger.
I can relate in having a specific style of writing at the moment, and thinking that all you need to improve is on certain aspects of writing, such as phrasing sentences. Also, I like how you state that you can settle on not being the best, but good enough to pass by. In my opinion, setting your goals too high sets you up for failure, so it doesn’t hurt to set your standards low.