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[nathaliemportfolio]

I am currently writing this in front of a beautiful sunset at Venice Beach. I got the Bluetooth speaker blasting Red Hot Chili Peppers and a bag full of all my favorite snacks ready to be demolished. I try to think about what I’m supposed to be doing at this very moment, but I can’t. I just keep on coming back to the smooth sound of waves crashing. Sounds like I’m in the most relaxing place ever right? Well, what if I told you everything I just wrote was a lie? Because it is.

In reality, I am currently dying with a huge headache, coughing my lungs out. I’m laid under my coziest blanket and about 3 layers of clothing, yet I still have the shivers. See what I just did there? That’s what I like about writing. In just a couple of words, I was able to manipulate the readers into thinking what I want them to think. I can be as creative as I want. I could have even said I was at Disneyland if I really wanted to, but I thought it’d be weird to be doing my writing assignment at Disneyland. Ironically, I didn’t actually look forward to this class. I came into the class just joyful to the fact that I was able to get a spot since it’s so impacted and I needed to take this class. I’m usually the one out of my friends with the worst enrollment window, so they had all taken writing their first year already and here I was barely taking my first writing class. As a Bio major, people usually warn you on what classes not to take together to avoid a heavy workload since Bio is a pretty hard subject already. Writing is one of those classes. They said take writing your first year because you won’t have to take lab or organic chemistry yet, but thanks to my enrollment window, I did the complete opposite of what everyone told me. I wasn’t able to get this class until my second year when I was taking lab AND organic chemistry. I didn’t really expect for this class to be hard, just very time consuming due to multiple draftings to produce the perfect paper.

[nathaliemportfolio]

I believe our first assignment was the Self-Assessment. The description read something among the lines that this paper was supposed to show off our writing skills and basically prove that we deserved to be in this level of writing.  I knew I was capable of producing a well written piece because I was placed into that class, but suddenly, the pressure came on. The last time I had written papers was high school. I mean that’s why I’m a science major because I wanted to avoid writing at all costs! I remember thinking that it was taking me way too long to start writing. To be honest, I probably started writing the day the assignment was due. I look back on it now and first thing I noticed is it was so short. I know I struggled because it’s always hard for me to start up. The introductory paragraph has to hook in the reader, so it always takes me a while to figure it out. As a whole, the paper is not bad at all, but my main concern is the length. It shows me I was really unsure about what to write because a well-planned paper would have enough things to write about. I find that it’s pretty easy writing about myself, but as soon as I get hit with prompts where I have to connect myself to things that are more serious, I struggle.

[nathaliemportfolio]

The RA Draft has to be the most helpful thing I’ve encountered so far in Writing 39B. It was the point where I actually realized where I needed to improve and what I was okay on. My first draft in my opinion was not good. I didn’t put enough time and effort into it and I basically only did it because it was an assignment that was due. I didn’t realize that the course was so fast paced, so I only ended up hurting myself by not trying on my first draft. The effort you put into your work definitely shows and I never thought of myself as a bad writer until I started receiving feedback. Professor Settell broke up the things us as a class struggle the most with and it really opened my eyes. I realized there is always room for improvement because although it seems like something sounds alright, a little tweaking can make it so much better. Off of my high school knowledge I always thought that a thesis was just an argument you are going to prove throughout your essay, but in class we learned it is more than that. Professor Settell gave us a xyz format of what a thesis should look like and I was missing the z part: the purpose. My first thesis is very broad. I did a lot of the “use big words to make it look better” but through drafting, my thesis changed tremendously. It was more specific and it had a purpose. I also used to think that thesis statements had to be one sentence that sums up your entire essay, but I found that was not the case. Professor Settell addressed that many people in the class had trouble with run on sentences. He said short and sweet is better. I used to sway away from short sentences because I feared it might make my writing look childish, but now I know. I took what I learned from class and improved my thesis statement and I believe it turned out way better than what I started with.

[nathaliemportfolio]

Another thing I encountered as I wrote my RA was that I would run out of thing to write about. I would have one thing in mind, write my soul out and then wonder “what now?” I found myself doing this as I wrote my RA and I brought it to my teacher’s attention as we did a sit down peer review. He advised me to record myself talking about what I want to write about and I would find that I actually know what I want to write about. It was strange to picture myself just talking out loud with no one around, but I did it and it actually really helped. For some reason we have all these thoughts in our heads that get simplified when we try to write them down and make them sound scholarly, but if you just say them out loud, you’ll find a lot to talk about. So, I’ve been using that method whenever I get stuck as I’m writing papers.