When it comes to writing almost all writers have their strengths and weaknesses. These areas of success and limitation vary from writer to writer. Whether they are good at sentence structure but have poor grammar, or they excel at punctuation but show poor paragraph structure, the list is endless.

Personally, my greatest strength in writing is the overall structure of the piece and my biggest challenge is structuring sentences throughout my work. I wasn’t always good at structuring paragraphs and knowing when to start a new paragraph when a new topic is being discussed but over time I got better and better. I remember that it was my biggest weakness in elementary school, always getting marks deducted due to my never-ending paragraphs.

In grade five my teacher took the time to teach me when a paragraph should end and new one begins. She taught me to brainstorm and write down all the ideas I have for a topic and those points would be where I separate my paragraphs. I find this suggestion very helpful, in fact I still use this tactic to this day to create good structure throughout all my writings.

My greatest weakness has always been and still is, sentence structure. I still find it challenging to configure a sentence with excellent flow, that doesn’t run on or be too short. I tend to combine multiple sentences into one, throwing in commas all over the place, trying to make the reader understand what I am talking about. But at the same time I still write using sentence fragments, not completing a full thought or idea.

In my most recent piece, “This I Believe”, I was told to “work on fine-tuning word choice and paraphrasing for clarity and correctness.” (D. Code, 2018) When working on my final draft I took this advice, making a few changes to some run on sentences as well as sentence fragments. This is the main weakness I will focus on for the Profile assignment, hoping to create a piece that includes: clear sentences, proper sentence structure, and zero sentence fragments. To ensure this, I will thoroughly edit my work multiple times over, as well as ask a fellow classmate who excels at sentence structure to read over my work, letting me know of any areas of improvement.

Knowing my areas of strength and weakness only makes me a better writer. A writer who strives to achieve a perfect piece of writing with very little to no errors to be found.

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References

Code, D. (2018, October 4). Re: This I Believe [Blog Comment]. Retrieved from

This I Believe