Diagnostic

In comparison to my writing today, I can tell that I have definitely changed as a writer.

One thing that I noticed was that there weren’t any pieces of evidence to back up my claims. I can see now after writing my research paper how importance backed up claims are with evidences from scholarly sources such as jstor, google books, and google scholars, as well as printed texts. I realize now that there is little credibility to making a claim without a reliable source, and how stupid personal stories and anecdotes are in an essay, because they provide no evidence or textual support.

I feel like I have also learned how to make a stronger thesis. Instead of just writing about a fact, I have learned to make more controversial statements and learned how to back them up with evidence in the essay. This clearly makes the essay more personal and more unique in that it offers the reader something to think about and a new point of view, instead of just stating the obvious.

There is definitely more room for improvement. I have not done very well in this class, but I feel like I have learned to think more critically about the readings and about how to analyze texts, instead of just writing about the plot line.