Hello, blog visitors! If you want to learn more about me or view any posts I’ve made, there are links to them in the menu at the top of the screen. There is also a menu on the side that links to them by category..

This blog is supposed to chronicles my growth as a communicator. It’s somewhat hard for me to tell how I’ve changed since I’ve started this class, as my writing skills seem to have stayed relatively static. However, this class has changed one important thing about the way I write: my first drafts. I used to be a bit of a perfectionist, and I would try to make my first draft flawless so I wouldn’t have to do any revisions. However, I’m not actually that good of a writer, and as such my papers would often turn out with small mistakes I could easily have caught if I put effort into revising them. This also caused my essays not to flow well at certain points, and sometimes transitions would be somewhat clunky as I did not always have a plan for the entire essay. For example, I wrote my entire summary of Lion in one go. I also did minimal editing, and it showed. The end of the essay feels rushed, and some parts in the middle are drawn out. While I have some good insight, it suffers from poor organization, and a plethora of sentence and word level errors. In contrast, I made a (relatively) clearer outline for my documented essay. I decided how I wanted to order my points and how they would fit together before writing the essay. As such, the transitions between different points are smoother, and while the conclusion is a bit shorter than it should be, the different parts of the essay fit together well. Because I did a significant amount of research before writing, and because I made an outline that I could stick to, the essay turned out better. I have also started to edit and revise my papers much more. Now, I will go over my papers several times before I turn them in, and I will often get a few of my friends, who are English majors, to help me fix any mistakes I’ve made. This is a great improvement over what I used to do, as I would skim through my essays once or twice before turning it in. Many of my early papers were error-ridden, but as the year went on the number of typos I made has slowly decreased. This class has refined my writing process and improved the final product of my essays.

As far as oral communication goes, I am still not the strongest presenter. This is because I often forget to practice presenting. In fact, I did not practice any of my presentations for class beforehand, which has made my oration less effective than it should have been. However, I handled panel discussions quite well. The inclusion of the audience makes these more dynamic, as opposed to the monologue of a presentation. In the end, my presentation skills would be much better if I simply practiced them more.

One significant challenge for me, in terms of my oral, visual, and electronic communication skills, is keeping my topic interesting and engaging. I try to include images and interesting facts in my presentations and slideshows, but I feel like they can often get bogged down by everything around them. As such, I am not sure about the efficacy of my -OVE communication skills, but I feel like they could be improved if I keep them engaging and show passion about my topic.

All in all, there have been a few significant improvements to my writing process. Now that I put effort into revising my papers and deciding what I want to write about beforehand, my papers are cleaner and better formatted than before. The other components of my communication skills have not changed very much, but I have become somewhat more comfortable with presenting and sharing my ideas visually.