I had another couple hundred words

Honestly, my writing style is a complete mess.  Going through high school I never really had a good English teacher.  My freshman english teacher was obsessed with finding metaphors in the books we read.  I would pay attention in discussion and write a paper about one of the big metaphors she pointed out.  I received average grades for these papers.  In my sophomore year my english teacher decided halfway through the year that he was not going to return the following year.  For the last three months class time was spent "working on our papers" which had to be five pages long.  Then at the end of the year he gave everyone an A rather than bother reading them.  In my junior and senior years my teachers  were the kinds of teachers where writing a paper was a completion grade.    

I cannot remember ever being told how to write a good paper.  The teachers would assign a paper and then expect me to know what I was doing.  My papers consisted of an intro with a poorly thought out three part thesis, three body paragraphs with forced analysis, and a conclusion that basically summed up everything I had written.  My sentence structure was always questionable and I used the word "that" far to often.  I was always shocked when my teachers would return to me a paper covered in red ink.  My paper grades were never in the A range.  The read ink all over my papers was never able to tell me how to improve a paper but almost always told me what I had done wrong.  

When I write a paper I usually spend my first attempts simply writing down my thoughts about the topic.  These sessions typically produce a paper lacking any flow or thesis; it is simply my ramblings about the topic.  After I have put all my thoughts on the paper, I go back and look for the ideas that produced the highest word count and choose those because it is obvious that I have more to say about those particular topics.  I try to write a thesis that incorporates all of those topics and then tweak my paragraphs to tie into the thesis.  It is a bad system, but I am very bad at picking a thesis and then developing arguments to support it.  I usually run out of things to say about that thesis before I reach my required word count and then I am forced to either change my thesis or make up the last few words with poor arguments that collapse under scrutiny.