My ability to write these longer seminar papers has always been part of my academic journey. As someone who had to write a more extended form of bachelor’s paper (~45 pages), the length of seminar papers has not been as daunting as it might have been if I had been in a different undergraduate program. However, one thing that I have seen tremendous improvement in is how I write papers. I have always struggled with correctly relating theories or even critiques within a document. Before joining this program, I found that I would often include a quote and deem that an appropriate way to back up my criticisms, which is definetely not the case.
One writing process that has transformed my writing is revising it. I don’t mean just to read it over for spelling or even grammatical errors. However, it revises and reworks papers so that they are structurally coherent. I will mention this repeatedly, but I often know what I want to say but can’t write the ideas down. In my head, I always know exactly what I want to write about or the topic I am interested in exploring, but getting the words down out is always the biggest hurdle to overcome. I know exactly what I want to say but can’t find the words to say it. But once I started writing, it got easier. My papers used to look like word vomit, and I would not spend time reworking and restructuring papers. However, this program has forced me to spend the time, paragraph by paragraph (and sometimes even sentence by sentence), dissecting the message or meaning to ensure that I am saying what I want/need to.
One thing that I still struggle with is creating a cohesive and concise thesis statement. I don’t know if that is something I will ever overcome because, as an educator, the curriculum geared towards secondary education always has short and simple thesis statements, but I know that is not always what thesis statements look like in post-graduate courses. It’s almost like an internal battle between what thesis sentences should look like and what I need them to look like. Curating the perfect thesis statement takes me the longest to do and even longer to edit.
Lastly, I have improved the most since beginning my journey in this program with writing introductions! That seems like something so simple, but it is indeed the one thing that I spent zero time writing. My introductions used to be so problematic that they included irrelevant or non-beneficial information. So, this has been something that I have seen the most improvement in, which makes sense considering I spend so much time editing and revising my papers now.
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