Self-Assessment: Joshua Zaborowski

In this blog I will be writing about the positives and negative factors in my writing. I will be showing examples and making commentary. Throughout this post it will be clear the mistakes I make in my grammar when trying to explain them. (Both my positive and negative factors) The first point I would like to expand on is my troubles on word choice. For example, instead of using more elaborate and descriptive words I tend to go with words such as: fun, cool or sad. When to make my writing more effective I should be using ecstatic, melancholy or stylist. The following sentence is an example of one my papers from English 302 last semester: Yet, Coors Light does a good job fighting this issue by making advertisements that appeal to multiple groups of people, not just alcohol consumers. When revising this sentence I simply changed the word fighting to combating and making to creating to show a much more descriptive and appealing argument to my audience. The next issue I have in my grammar skills is the usage of commas. This is by far my weakest skill. I tend to use them too much and put them in places where deemed un-necessary. This problem then leads to my writing having too many run on sentences. This next example is from an essay I wrote for my Shakespeare 205 class last semester:  Through the first weeks of class, I still thought Shakespeare was only a significant author because of his deep writing and how at sometimes it’s very difficult to decipher. This sentence is a perfect of example of an un-needed comma. The sentence structure from my understanding would be correct if it were to be removed. As for run on sentences goes my problem is that I try to put too many thoughts into one sentence, instead of developing one thought and making my case stronger. The following sentence is a made up example of me doing this. Lots of people like hot dogs, hamburgers, corn dogs, steaks and sea food more than they like vegetables and fruits; which is why these food items are sold more at social events because it is appealing to the consumer and will allow for the company to make more money. This sentence should be divided up and have each thought expanded on, because it will then allow my writing to be more clear and structured. To go off structure, I believe my sentence structure could use vast improvement. I have a horrible tendency of starting my sentences off with the same words and it starts to make my writing boring to read and in addition to this more than 75% of them use the same type of patter. As you can see throughout this whole write-up I just now realized that my sentences to explain these flaws were all exactly the same. I went from stating my flaw, showing the example and then commentating on it. These are all the things I want to work on throughout this course, so that might my writing won’t be so dull. Going off of that I want to learn new skills so that it will help me to get out of my comfort zone and take my writing to the next level.