Writing has always been intimidating to me. Like many people, I gravitate towards things that I am naturally good at. In school, I would use my strengths in math and science to my advantage to over compensate for my lack of writing ability. I find myself doing that same thing to this day. As a writer, I consider myself to be slightly below average. My inexperience coupled with a lack of interest, turns writing into a grueling process which is ultimately reflected in my writing. One thing I do have to my advantage is that once I begin writing, I am committed. I try to be thoughtful with word choice and will research topics as much as possible to learn all that I can so that my writing is accurate and well thought out. While this is a great strength and I believe my ideas are solid, I have always struggled with putting my thoughts onto paper in a way that is clear and concise to readers. My writing is often too wordy and full of details that are not crucial to the point. I also tend to write the same way that I talk. Writing this way may work well in specific genres, but is not for academic writing.
As a whole, the writing process is very time consuming for me. This is something that I would rate as the least desirable part of writing for me. I spend a lot of time organizing my thoughts in my head before I even begin to put them on paper. I will often use a large portion of time researching my topic to understand the whole picture. I like to hear conflicting arguments and a variety of perspectives. I think this helps me to make solid and deliberate actions when I’m writing. After researching, ideas will churn in my head for hours until I can figure out a way to put them on paper in a way that makes sense to me and to a reader. I need to find ways to organize my research and thoughts in a way that I can easily access.
One of my major issues in the area of