Your First Blog Assignment!

Dearest Students. Upon creating your blogs, please complete this survey/self-assessment as your first blog assignment. Please copy the survey, complete it, and post it to your blog by 11:59 PM Sunday, September 7th.

Best!

Natalie
Writing Autobiography and Self-Assessment

INSTRUCTIONS: Please share a little about yourself as a writer. Use the questions below as “invention” questions to stimulate your thinking, and post the answers to your blog. Write in complete sentences, using as many specific details as you can recall. At the same time, write quickly, without interrupting yourself to revise. This assignment calls for an informal, personal response, so it will not be graded for grammatical correctness. However, note that you may be sharing this information with the public through your blog, so it does need to be readable and not overly personal.

1. Introduce yourself briefly. Where are you from? Where have you gone to school? What educational plans brought you to the University of Maryland, and what fields of learning or potential majors interest you at this stage in your academic career?

2. What kinds of writing have you done in high school? At UMD? At another college? Outside of a school setting?

3. What steps do you usually follow when you write a paper? Do you outline? Revise? Compose on a word processor? What part of the writing process do you find easiest? What part do you find hardest?

4. What kind of writing has given you the most satisfaction?

5. What is the longest or most challenging paper you have ever had to write? How did you go about preparing and writing it? What did you learn about writing from that experience?

6. What do you remember learning about writing from other courses or other writing experiences that you found useful?

7. Assess your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. What are you good at? What aspects of your writing are you dissatisfied with?

8. What part of the writing process do you think you will need the most support with?

9. If you had your choice of subjects for a research project, what issues or topics would you like to write about?

10. What do you associate with the term argument? How do you feel about taking a course that focuses on argumentation?