Reviving Your Confidence with the Tools of the Trade
I took the Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade on Coursera this past Spring. The five-week course covered a basic review of sentence and paragraph structures as well as present and past tense.
There were several writing assignment that I had to complete along with peer reviews in order to receive the Certificate of Completion at the end of the course.
Below is my last writing assignment based on my feelings about completing the course.
Reviving Your Confidence with the Tools of the Trade
By finishing the Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade online course, it will help me become a more confident writer. Throughout my writing life, I have had issues with sentence and paragraph structures. I suffered with run on sentences, excessive paragraph lengths, and tense agreements. With these issues, I used to be ashamed to show my writing because I knew it would be filled with corrections and side notes. However, over the years, I have developed thick skin to combat these criticisms. I have used editors for my work and embraced the corrections and side notes. I have tried to better my writing with the editor’s notes but I feel I still have not grasped everything. Even though, I have two blogs that I write for, the limitations I see in my writing style stems from the lack of knowing the rules and to use them creatively. To pursue a more aggressive writing career, besides my blogs, seems unreachable; mainly because my writing is not up to par for entertaining freelance and copyediting work. Therefore, I am still struggling with the “tools of the trade” which is stifling me. Nevertheless, my struggle has slowly been diminishing; since taking this course. The understandable information that I have received is my armor to combat any doubts. There is more of a connection I can see with the sentence and paragraph structures, clauses and phrases, and tense agreements. However, my writing is still not perfect but I can see some possible freelance work in the future. At the end, my experience with the Crafting an Effective Writer: Tools of the Trade online course has helped me to become a confident writer because I have a better understanding of the tools of the trade.