Reflection on my Writing

The blog that I had written this semester was titled Sports and Physical Activities. The blog posts were about different sports and physical activities and how participating in them can be good for one’s health. The first blog post that I chose to look back at was called Evaluative Summary Blog. This post was about the article “Transfer of Strength and Power Training to Sports Performance” by Warren B. Young and how well the article was written. My intention with this assignment was to give a review on this article while also trying to make people more aware of the benefits of being and staying active, and hopefully inspire people to become active and participate in sports or other physical activities. My audience for my blog posts was a wide range of ages. I tried to find articles that people of all ages could relate to. My thesis for the assignment was: “The article “Transfer of Strength and Power Training to Sports Performance” is a well written scientific article that gives good examples of how strength and power training can transfer to one’s performance in sports, how it everything actually works physically, and how one can apply the training.” I felt that my thesis was well-defined and that it contained all three parts. In the blog post, I demonstrated my ability to analyze by quoting sections from the article to strengthen my claim that the article was well written. I work well with another’s work because I always try to look for places and different things that I can use to back up my arguments with.

            The same aspects could also apply to how I wrote my research paper. My research paper was titled Marching Band vs. Sports. The paper was about how marching band is a sport through specific reasons and comparisons with certain aspects of sports, and since marching band is a sport then it should receive the same recognition and funding as one. My audience for this paper was high school and college students as well as adults, specifically the ones who have the power over what is considered a sport. My thesis statement was:  “Marching band is a sport and therefore should receive recognition and funding as one.” I demonstrated my ability to analyze and my ability to work with another’s work by quoting parts from different articles to back up my arguments.

            Looking back at my work over the semester, I noticed that there really wasn’t a big change in how I was writing. Over the semester, my writing didn’t really change, but the way I was writing was strengthened from continuing to write in the same style. In every paper that I wrote, I always tried to quote things from the articles I found to back up my arguments and make my claim stronger. For example in an earlier blog post, I had quoted: The positive or negative transfer could be achieved by either “increased excitatory neural activation of muscles that contribute to skillful performance and/or by inhibition of muscles that can degrade performance” (Young). For the research paper, I also quoted many things. One example was: With 8 weeks with home games, 8 weeks with away games, and an entire week of band camp, the HMB practiced for about 274 hours during one semester, which does not include any extra time for sectional rehearsals or individual practicing (Bough, 2012).  This shows that there wasn’t much change to my writing. I feel that the way I write was just strengthened by everything we did during the semester.