~Critical Thinking and Writing Skills~

Hmm... critical thinking. I love critical thinking and I'm pretty sure I do it almost 24/7. Except for about now where it's the end of the quarter and my brain feels tense and fried, so hopefully I can manage to spit out three awesome papers and then I will be good to go. I know that I can't give up now after all of the effort I've put into my classes this quarter. Anyways, critical thinking. I would say I am very comfortable doing this when reading texts. I can look at something in class, whether it be a book passage or a peer's essay and almost immediately form an opinion about the content and how effective it is in doing certain things. I can also look at texts in relation to each other and see connections and differences. I was able to use these skills a lot in class when we looked at essays as a group, as well as doing readers reviews. I was actually often surprised at how quickly I was able to do (what I think was) a comprehensive readers review on a peer's essay. I just read it through and then went back and made notes about specific things in the paper and was able to write a few paragraphs about overall themes and ideas that were hits or misses. I think this is a very good skill to have because analyzing texts are important and being able to do it quickly also enabled to me to take on extra credit reviews without having to worry about adding too much to my workload.

As for writing, I really have improved a lot in this area during my senior year of high school as well as last year. I was lucky enough to have some really smart teachers/professors who helped me a lot. I have always been a good reader and not a bad writer but probably not as good as I could have been. More advanced than my age level expectations certainly, but that's not how I judge myself. If I know I can do better or I know there's something better out there I'm not going to stop until I'm at the best I know how to do even if it's above what's expected of me. I expect more of myself. It's like when Professor Thompson and I had a conversation about my last paper and I had all these changes to make and the draft was due the next morning and I was like ahh how am I going to make all these changes? And she said don't worry it's just a draft I'm not even going to see it until the next time you turn it in, but I knew I couldn't turn it in without making those changes because I knew they had to be made.