~The End of the Third Wave~

I decided on this entry title because I was thinking about my final paper for my history of women in the U.S. class and how on Thursday the prof was talking about the different waves of the women's rights movement, and I think that I also have similar waves of progress with regards to my writing. My senior year of high school was the first where I improved a lot and really started to put more weight in the practice of writing and my abilities. Then last year at PLU was the second wave where I learned a lot about writing and what's expected at the college level and just a lot of skills that I gained. And now academic writing for fall quarter 2010 is coming to an end-- the end of the third wave. I don't think I could say which were more valuable since the waves build off of each other. But if you disregard the fact that the third wave wouldn't have been as successful without the first two, I would have to say that so far I have gained the most upper level skills in the third wave.

I have really enjoyed the approach that Professor Thompson takes to writing and it's changed a lot of how I look at texts. The areas I probably made the most improvements in are disciplinary awareness and synthesis. So basically looking at the bigger picture is what I have made the biggest strides in. I definitely spent the most time revising papers this quarter than I ever have in the past. I remember all through junior high and most of high school I hated the idea of rough drafts and I thought they were pointless because I was intelligent enough to spit out something good enough on the first try. This was usually true, reinforcing my skewed notion, but now in academic writing I really see the value of drafts and editing. I found it helpful to have different due dates for drafts to make sure that I got each done and gave the appropriate amount of time to each stage of the writing process. I actually have my dad reading over a final paper right now on presidential accountability for torture (whoa, right?) because I know the value of a separate pair of eyes reading it over to judge cohesiveness and find errors.

All in all I have enjoyed writing this quarter a lot and I look forward to next quarter! :)