I find this about writing so beautiful. I'm definitely not a good writer, and I always have a difficult time starting an assignment. Because I tend to start an assignment with gaps between my ideas, it's hard to get myself to start anything. But when I do start writing, everything starts to form and shuffle together. It's awesome. I wish can value that process more like these professional writers and focus more on creating rather than composing.

I tend to worry a lot about repetition. As I said before, English classes in high school were all about composition; therefore, we needed to sound smart (or at least, that's how I thought about it). Since repetition tends to downgrade the quality of our writing, I always pulled up thesaurus.com to avoid it. It's interesting to see that I'm not the only one with this concern.

This is actually a really interesting finding. I didn't realize this until now, but I tend to focus on vocabulary as well. It's not because I believe that sounding smart is more important than actually conveying insightful ideas, but because English classes tend to repress creativity. As a result, I tend to value composition more than my ideas.

I always have trouble with this when I am writing. I don't always get to say everything I want to say about an idea because I don't know how to communicate it in a sophisticated manner, I can't tell if it relates to the topic well (if it is important enough to mention), or I'm insecure about the idea. But this is also something I want to work on in this project as well: to be able to identify what I should and should not include in a paragraph, depending on whether it relates to the topic and how well it supports the thesis.

On this research argument analysis paper, I want to be able to form an effective thesis. I always have trouble with this. Perhaps it's because I write the thesis after the body paragraphs. But since I feel that the thesis was my weakest point in my previous paper, I would definitely work on this in the project.

I actually really like it when people are more "mean" with my writing during peer editing (but obviously not offensive). I feel like we all have the tendency to be "nice:" 90% compliments and 10% small suggestions, just to be polite to our peers. But it should definitely be the opposite, it's more helpful that way.

I feel that not enough people address this. It's easy to feel pressured especially when given such a big assignment and thus we might not write as well as we want to. Since our assignment due Wednesday is a first draft, I'm trying really hard not to panic about it, but it's hard. And I hate that I want to procrastinate even more because I feel so pressured.

Not exactly, Ruth just loses credibility with inconsistent grammar. According to Chapter 2.

This reminds me of a concept I learned in psychology called "deindividualization." It is the loss of self-awareness in groups. I found myself doing this a lot in my previous English classes. There would be times when I chose to use others' ideas than my own in writing because I was insecure about my own. On top of that, my previous English classes valued composition over creativity, so it didn't exactly feel refraining; it was rather more for convenience. And because always approached writing like this, the transition to creativity can get rather difficult sometimes.

This makes a lot of sense to me. Even though it has only been 3 weeks in this class, I already love the flexibility in the assignments of this class. I find myself enjoying the readings and enjoying responding to it with my own ideas and my own ways. The openness to creative input and different media makes the class much more interesting to me.

This was a very interesting read. It reminded me a lot about writing college application essays and how much I struggled with writing those. But this author (and her sense of humor) made me realize that it is important to value the process of writing (even when you are staring at a wall for 10 minutes). I'm excited to see how much I can grow as a writer this quarter.

It's somewhat comforting to see that even a professional writer has trouble starting the first draft. When I start a first draft (if i even can), I huff and puff and stall for what feels like a million years until i write "the" as the first word. And then delete it.