Changes in writing process blog post

I don't feel that my writing has changed in any particularly profound ways throughout the semester, however my organization is progressively getting better. In the beginning of the semester I had a hard time setting up an argument. After a couple papers I was finally able to get the idea down for a strong topic sentence, followed by evidence, and then a discussion of how that evidence supports my argument. Simply getting my argument into that model improved my papers significantly.

By doing different types of research over different areas of our project I've gotten a lot better at finding the articles I need in the library databases. The trick I learned was to do multiple searches with subtle keyboard changes. For example I would do a search on "commercial spaceflight", another on "private spaceflight", "private sector, space", "spaceflight companies", so on and so forth. I still have a problem keeping my paper under some sort of umbrella topic. Once I start doing research, I tend to get really distracted by learning new things and forget what I'm wanting to talk about specifically. By the time I get to the end of my paper I have to go back and change my thesis to something more appropriately related to the sources I found.

I still am having trouble starting my papers, but my strategy seems to be working out well enough. I spend a few days reading over article, getting a sort of mental grid of how each topic relates to one another, then just start writing the body paragraphs. I like to make a list of topic sentences in my Word document then go through my sources and see what I can back up and have enough material to discuss. Often there will be a couple topic sentences that seem great, but are too distant to the "umbrella topic", and could potentially be topics for other papers.

I've also grown to really value the input from other people reading my papers. Peer review always helps me make sure I keep a forward enough paper so my reader knows what I'm talking about, and also get to understand my more common grammar/structure mistakes. I was never big into writing papers for school, but now I've finally learned the formula for academic writing more-or-less, so I feel a lot more comfortable and feel that I've started to find my voice in writing.