Skills to be Learned Part 2

The first skill I initially chose for my “Skills to be Learned” blog post was integrating sources. Over the span of this course, I can definitely say that I have had my fair share of doing so. In each part of my rhetorical analysis paper, multiple sources were necessary to add credibility to my argument. This is a process I was not very familiar and comfortable with before this class, and I know that it will come in handy in future research papers for my other college classes. The next thing I wanted to learn was how to outline and organize my thoughts in order to create a logical and understandable paper. This is something I am now very confident in, and having a formula for each of the assignments really helped with this. Being able to have a strong foundation that you can branch out on has made all the difference in my papers, as opposed to my typical freestyle-type writing. I also have struggled with reaching the minimum paper length without dragging it out unnecessarily. Initially, even reaching 350 words for a blog post was a challenge, and incredibly time consuming. With the past few assignments, I have had no problem reaching the word count of 900, and the only time consuming part was the research. Especially because of the topic I chose, there is a plethora of information for me to use, and it wasn’t necessary to try to stretch my papers out. If anything, I had to be very conscious to carefully stick to the points I was trying to make, so not to confuse the reader on the already complicated subject. Getting stuck really hasn’t been as much of an issue as I expected it to be, mostly because of my interest in what I have been arguing. If at any point I felt stuck, I learned ways to get past it and when it is necessary to take breaks. I would say the revision has been more difficult than the writing itself. The last skill I chose was reading college level sources, which I believe I did through my weeding of articles and all of the assigned close readings. Overall, I am leaving more confident in my writing and conveying of thoughts than when I started.
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