Diagnostic Essay

After reading through my diagnostic essay and comparing it to the next two essays that I have written for the class, I have seen a couple areas of improvement that will definitely be useful to my later writing. One of the biggest improvements that I have noticed is the organization of the essay. Before taking the class, I rarely wrote out outlines before writing and didn't have a clear style of organization to apply. After writing out a couple of outlines in this class, I realized how much easier it is to organize both the essay and your thoughts through an outline. Furthermore, I have started writing better transitions between paragraphs. I learned this through our in class reading of one of the better essays a student submitted. The transitions were not necessarily the fanciest ones that I have seen, but it was clear and connected which is easy on the brain to run through. I also noticed that I have improved my introduction paragraph and now understand more about the placement of my thesis within the organization of an essay. I realized that in my attempt to make the introduction flowery, I have misplaced the thesis and made the essay's introduction mottled and not to the point. One very important lesson that I learned was about backing up my claims with sufficient, concrete evidence. In my more recent essays, I have been called out for problems of putting out claims without evidence or substantiated evidence and I am now more cognizant of the problem and have worked to make sure that every claim that I make is backed. I still have a lot of learning to do and my writing is definitely not where I want it to be, but I have made several great improvements since the beginning of the class.