The Rewriting process

My Prose is Dreadful

I have trouble writing and my mind is quickly diverted by what I am writing. The issue began in elementary school in my home country of Saudi Arabia, where I did not receive a solid base in literature. We had composition lessons, but the teachers either substituted other subjects or ignored them. As a result, my writing skills are very limited, and I normally tend to participate in group discussions to help me brainstorm ideas for essays. When I write essay papers for different courses I need different styles while writing each essay, in engineering, I don’t focus on grammar or misspellings. I just write what I know and hand out the paper but for other classes like the Korean history I take care of grammar, spellings and the organization of the ideas in the paper.

Getting Stuck at the Beginning

Most times when I write, I usually get stuck at the beginning of the essay. When this it happens I try reading some articles about the subject I am writing about or walk around the room stretching out thinking of an answer. Most times I give up at the beginning since the start of the essay is the important thing. It is the determinant factor of what opinion the reader gets about the essay and if he or she will continue reading it or not. Those are some of the reasons why I preferred getting in the engineering major because there isn’t much writing to do.

Stressed Out by Perfection

I always get stressed out when I hand over my paper to the professor because I would like everything to be perfect and also get the full grades out of the essays. First thing I see from the results I got from my professor is that my strongest point is the elaborative voice. I like to put my own ideas and thoughts on subjects I write about and wonder how people will react to them when they read them. I think it is a good thing because sometimes you want to get a good impression from the readers about what you wrote.

Lack of Confidence

Low self-efficacy is my other weak area, this is due to lack of confidence about my writing. I might re-write my essays just because I think they are not good enough or they will not give me a full grade. It’s a kind of imperfection on my side which I think I should find a motivator to write the essays and have some confidence about what I write and believe in my abilities.

Lack of Revision

Third point is reflective-revision, and it’s my weakest skill, since I don’t revise my papers because I take too long to write them. I just send the papers because if I revise them I will never get done correcting them. I know it is a bad habit but my thoughts about it is that since I don’t have time to revise my essays I should sometimes get one of my friends to read through my papers and correct me.

Being Spontaneous and Impulsive

Fourth mistake is being spontaneous and impulsive; my score wasn’t that bad on the report. When I write something I always plan to dedicate time on it but suddenly I end up one night before the deadline with only half of the paper done. My writing is not academic and most of it is in the colloquial style because I learned English from the movies and songs from the internet. I didn’t learn proper English in the school and if there was an English class it was so basic and that is why my English is in colloquial style, not so formal and well-planned in an academic writing style.

Treating Writing as a Product

My last point is procedural, my score was high. I always treat what I write as a product to deliver to the professor, I don’t really write most of the time and when the professor asks me to write an essay I am hopeful to get good grades on it. My thoughts about this point are that it depends on the topic of the essay the professor has asked for. If it was an open writing session with no rules about a specific subject, in this situation I would put my ideas and thoughts on the essay with examples. I don’t have full confidence in my English writing abilities but I’m trying to improve it by taking writing classes and doing more exercises, hopefully one day I can write the essays more easily with no worries.