I am approaching the deadline for my first major assignment in this course. After submitting the first draft of my critical review; I have had an opportunity to take a closer look at my writing. After looking over the style guides from the Purdue OWL website, I have made some observations about my writing. 

I am usually pretty formal in my style of writing, I try to write in a manner that is informative but I like to try to make it my own (even if I am citing other work). I take my time to choose my words carefully and make sure I am catering my writing to the audience who will be reading it. I have tended to favour the APA style because it is what I'm used to from my undergraduate writing. The first impression a reader may get from my work that is that I am very concise; I assert my points without getting carried away and getting off track. I also think at times I may seem a bit too clinical in my writing and not show as much creative flair as I would like to. However, in academic writing showing creative flair can be quite difficult as your paper has a specific purpose and I would not want to divert the reader away from that. 

My reaction to the style guides was that I was not surprised. There are some small details that I want to pay extra attention to because I want to be certain that I doing it correctly each time. 
The style guide can definitely be used to improve my writing. I think having a guide is very helpful because it makes the expectations very clear and leaves the margin for error very small. I believe the style guides will have a strong influence on the work I am doing now and I plan to refer back to them for future writing pieces.

One of the most common issues that I have encountered in my writing is that I am using comma splices. I am trying to join my ideas together in one sentence, but unfortunately this is resulting in a style error. After receiving my most recent draft back with comments, the splices were identified to me in the comment section by the professor. She noticed the pattern and made suggestions to correct it. This feedback was very important to me because I want any stylistic errors to be corrected early so that my grades will not be adversely affected. I will edit these by paying close attention to how my sentences are structured. I will need to carefully read the sentences and decipher whether a semi-colon or a separate sentence should be employed. 

This week has been a very revealing week in regards to my writing. I have enjoyed reading the work of others and having my work also revised my peers and professor. Their feedback has been very useful to me and I will be taking their comments and edits into consideration as I prepare to hand in my first paper.