end of week four

My process of writing, as it has always been, goes a little like this: I read the prompt topic over about three times and sit and take a second to let it soak in. Then once I get a thought about what I can write, I just jump into the writing process, usually skipping the brainstorming part. Recently, I have learned this is not such a good thing because getting your ideas out on paper, and being able to outline and organize your thoughts makes the writing part much easier and usually less time consuming.  I also tend to always use adverbs in basically every sentence to try and make my writing stronger, but through this class I have learned that they are usually unnecessary, extra words that weaken the point you are trying to get across. On the topic of revision, when I first heard that we were going to do three different drafts for just one paper I was shocked; the first draft is usually good enough and doesn’t need to be written two more times. That’s the initial thought I had in my head until I actually revised my first paper. I was still adding or making corrections all the way through the third draft and even then it still was probably not perfect. When writing, I start to get distracted and worried that my text doesn’t make any sense, isn’t good enough, and is completely off topic. I stop writing and question whether I should just start over completely or change what I’m writing about. Then in class we learned about “the watcher at the gates” and I realized that that little person in my mind was the one who was preventing me to complete my paper. It helped me out a lot to realize that tuning out and ignore the watcher was a dire thing that needed to be done in order to complete a paper. I have learned so much in these four weeks of English that I would never imagine possible!