How Journal Assignments Improve Writing and Thinking about Writing - Essay Example

These assignments also shaped my thinking because I became more conscious of how writers communicate with their readers and how to make connections between texts and real-life that deepened my reading process through developing hindsight and insight.

These assignments affected my writing because these articles had different writing styles and formats that improved my consciousness of my writing process by teaching me that they must be geared towards the needs of my audience.  For instance, though I used sources that are considered scholarly articles, Daniel Miller’s and Mark Griffiths’ works have an essay format, while Aysen Bakir and Scott J. Vitell use a typical empirical article format that includes the research design, findings, and discussion.  These formats show that I must also know the proper formats that are aligned with what my audience needs and expects.  Moreover, these assignments emphasized the importance of writing style to writing effectiveness.  By effectiveness, I refer to being credible and persuasive to my audience.  I believe that these articles are valid and convincing because of their use of formal academic language and credible sources that their target audiences may find important.  Through these assignments, I understood the centrality of the audience in making decisions about formats and writing styles.

Besides enhancing my awareness of my writing process and making me more concerned about my audience’s needs, these assignments improved my thinking as a writer because I realized that there are different ways of presenting and supporting arguments and that connecting readings with real life and other texts deepen my ability to develop insight and hindsight.  These articles approached their arguments and topics in different ways.   Bakir and Vitell made conclusions about what parents think regarding the ethics of food advertising that targets children, only after they have gathered their data.  Miller used the main points of the critics of consumerism to prove the latter’s incorrect assumptions about consumerism.  Griffiths addressed the pros and cons of video gaming while highlighting how it can contribute to health improvement.  These articles demonstrate that I can use diverse ways to present and offer my main points, as long as I do so concern my audience’s characteristics and needs. In addition, making outlines, summaries, and reflective responses improved my ability to acquire hindsight and insight. Writing the outlines and summaries gave me insight into the thought processes of the writers while writing the reflections helped me gain hindsight about consumerism’s and video gaming’s effects on society.  Furthermore, I improved my ability to make connections among texts and between them and my life, which deepened my learning process.  Making these connections underscored the role of reading making sense of the world and to improve it.

These assignments helped me become more aware of how I think by being more conscious of how other writers think.  I learned how to think about my writing because I thought about the writing of others.  These articles also enhanced my writing skills because they expressed diverse ways of communicating their main points to their audiences.  Finally, I developed my ability to synthesize readings where I learned more through connecting these readings with my experiences and other texts.  I can write new ideas or change old ones because of what I learned, which is essential to students who want to be writers who think analytically and critically.