Visual Rhetoric Essay

           All throughout grade school I struggled with writing papers.  I was never good at processing ideas and putting them in a logical order and it always seemed like I had to do three times the planning and idea mapping as everyone else.  Also, it always took me about five times longer than everyone else to write papers and I still found myself getting lower grades on them.  Writing this paper has helped me significantly with planning out my ideas and putting them in a logical order through the various techniques that you taught us and all of the ones listed in the DK handbook.  However, I still had some trouble putting my ideas together into a paper.  I had all of them listed in a logical order, but they all seemed to link to one another so I didn’t know how to separate them into paragraphs.  In my rough draft, I ended up putting almost all of my ideas into one big paragraph, which made my paper not flow correctly.  That was a big problem that I struggled with, but when you handed back my paper with the feedback, it helped a lot.  I found it easier to write my paper once I realized how to categorize my ideas into separate paragraphs.  I did have some other problems though. 

The problem that I struggled with the most was that I couldn’t seem to get to 1500 words.  I got to about 1000 words and it seemed that all I had to write left was my conclusion and I would be done.  I felt that if I added anything else to my paper that it wouldn’t flow together or I’d have to force myself off topic just to get to the word limit.  However, after going back over and over again and stretching thin every topic that I had, and after adding a few things in, I reached 1500 words. 

I think I can improve on a few things for my next paper.  I will definitely try to do a bubble map to plan out and narrow down my thoughts.  I feel like that will help me be able to stretch out my ideas so the word limit isn’t a problem and I also think it will help my paper flow better.  Also, I will make sure to not procrastinate as much.  I had a lot of tests and assignments due for other classes the same week the paper was due so I found myself continuously pushing it off. Next time, I want to try to write a little bit every night so I’m not spending hours at a time writing it and stressing myself out.