A Writer Am I?

Writing has never been the most pleasurable thing for me. I have never been the most eloquent writer but over the last couple of years I have made great strides in the right direction. I improved greatly by just paying attention to how the author writes, when reading a book, and learning from their great expertise. There are things I need to improve on and some skills that I have honed and made my own. I am good at incorporating my voice into things I write. My writing has a personality that makes reading it fun and easy. Some things are just too dry, they have no sarcasm. Incorporating this voice into my writing gives me great pleasure but is not appropriate for formal papers.

I find myself often struggling when writing a more formal paper that asks me to analyze something. Trying to get what I am thinking down on paper in a coherent manner is difficult. I often repeat the same point just in a different way because I am struggling to find a way to convey my meaning to my audience. Sometimes what comes out of my head just does not make sense to anyone else but me. I have to improve my sentence structures to help better convey meaning through my writing. During the last school year I read “Madame Bovary” written by Gustave Flauber. (For more information about Gustave Flauber and his controversial book go to http://www.madamebovary.com/) Flauber creates these amazing descriptions that allow you to see what the character sees. The thing about Flauber is that everything he writes has a purpose; he often uses seemingly meaningless things to convey a very important theme in the book. He made me relies just how much each individual word means and that when writing I should strive for deeper meaning and creating a more vivid seen.

Another skill I have when writing a paper is taking my past experiences and things that I have read and incorporating them into a paper. I stay away from writing about what I do not know; I am just setting myself up for failure. I often use lessons that I learned the hard way and things that I have read in books as examples to support my points or often to convey meaning about a hard to understand subject. Another weakness I have is that I often just write only a rough draft and never make revisions. When writing I really need to improve my proofreading skills. I recently read “As I Lay Dyeing” by William Faulkner and I absolutely hated. (for more information for to http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/asilay/) Reading this book was painful because Faulkner wrote in the cultural tone of his characters, which they were all uneducated. Trying to make sense of the improper English was very difficult, some things just made no sense. Despite the book being very hard to understand I took a lot away from his writing. The way he portrayed each character in his book, making them very real to the reader, influenced how I described characters and gave them their own voice in the book, making them more lifelike.