Assessing Your Own Writing

This week's reading talks about assessing your own writing. The first section is about the writing that you do for yourself. It says that if you're just writing for yourself then just let the ideas flow. It's best just to free-write when you are writing for yourself. You can use lists, journal writing or cubing writing. The next paragraph talks about writing for others. It brings up a good point that we need to make our writing as good as possible because we are never there to explain why we wrote what we wrote. The reading says to assess writing in two stages: consider how well it meets the rhetorical situation, then study the writing itself to check it's focus. You need to check your focus, the support and the organization of the writing. The next chapter talks about revising. It says to bring it to writing-center tutors because they can point out problems that you might have not seen in your work. After they make their points, you must revise your work. Some reasons to revise are to sharpen your focus, strengthen the argument, improve the organization and for clarity.