Throughout the
course of the year, after having written numerous TOW posts, I realized that my
overall style of writing has become smoother. With each post, I felt less and
less like I was writing a specifically structured response to really just
writing a clear and personal analysis of a text, whether it be visual or
written. Although the posts could at times be a nuisance, I believe that
writing one every week helped me develop and implement my skills as a writer. I
think that these posts helped me in mastering the formulation of proper thesis
statements and I attempted to include a context, claim and consequence in each.
I also tried to vary my use of rhetorical strategies and utilizing different
terms and examples aided me in remembering the many devices. At first, I used
many texts from the source, Time magazine, but as the year progressed, I got
tired of seeing the same sort of text and I thus attempted to use many
different credible sources. This exposure to various sources allowed me to
analyze texts of numerous topics. Though these posts really helped me, I
believe that there are many things I could have done in order to reap more
benefit from them. Towards the end of the year, I felt that my own writing
style started to show and that I was not really following a set format.
However, I think that I could have embraced this fact to a larger extent and
done so much earlier in the year. I also often wrote the posts in one large
paragraph. If I had broken them down more, I feel that the writing would be
more complex and would maybe even provide more practice with topic sentences.
However, despite these facts, I believe that these TOW posts were incredibly
beneficial. Relentlessly writing one every week provided constant practice of
analyzing different texts and of writing a mini-analysis essay of sorts. Since
we wrote analysis essays at the beginning of the year, the TOWs kept those
skills fresh in our mind by allowing us to write them on a much smaller scale.
I really enjoyed the exposure to many texts and I appreciate how the TOWs
helped me develop into a better student and writer.
