My (not so great) Writing Process

• After reading about the four types of writers, I decided that I am mostly a "sequential composer" with an emphasis on being a "procrastinator."

• Before I begin to write anything, I generally take a piece of scratch paper and write out my main ideas, and what I want each paragraph to contain. Unfortunately, I have a bad habit of doing this right before the deadline, so that makes me a procrastinator. Over the years and throughout many school projects, my writing style has been mostly effective for me, only failing me a handful of times.

• My strengths are that I rely heavily on written notes in order to maintain the topic and not get off track, which is immensely helpful in shaping my drafts. I also work slowly through papers, generally not moving on to the next paragraph until the current one is perfectly composed.

• My weaknesses are that I usually wait until the last day to write my papers, and that really limits my creativity. I say this because I usually don't have multiple days to leave my paper, think of new and better ways to say the information I'm presenting, and then edit my draft. I usually stick to one draft and slightly tweak it, which I would like to change and I feel by doing so I could write much better papers.

• I do believe it would be beneficial to me to try a new approach, such as the "heavy revising" approach. I already plan my papers out well and thoroughly, but after that, I don't do much revising. Coming up with new ways to say my information and editing it more thoroughly would definitely be more beneficial to me.

Flickr. Rough Draft, June 25, 2010, Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

I picked this photo to represent my writing style because before I draft, I write out what I want in each paragraph, and then add/delete/revise information before putting it in my paper.