Always room for improvement

By Maia Irvin 

A learning experience that has been a bit stressful and sometimes discouraging. That's how I would describe writing labs in class so far. 

I don't think that I've ever been this stressed about writing. Writing accurately under a time constraint is difficult. I feel like I give up some of the accuracies I normally wouldn't in a non-timed situation just because I'm giving more focus to time than I normally would. I wouldn't say that the stress from labs is bad or that I hate it though. I honestly think that it fuels my drive to work harder, and the time constraint will make me a better writer, I just need to get used to it.

The feeling that I have the hardest time coping with when it comes to labs is discouragement. The past couple of labs I've left feeling relatively okay about my writing, but once my writing is actually graded, I realize just how many errors I made that I didn't notice or even think about the first time around. It's discouraging, to say the least, and it's hard to not think about all of the "what ifs" and "if only I had done this differently" for the rest of the day after looking over the feedback sheet. 

I understand though that this is all a very new way of writing for me, and mistakes are bound to happen. 

This is a learning experience like none I've ever had before, and so far, I've already learned a lot when it comes to news writing. I've learned many little things that I would've never thought about but can now incorporate into future labs to hopefully perform better. 

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