Writing Reflection

I have definitely improved in my essay writing this year. In the past I would try to generalize the topic and avoid actually answering the question or prompt, but this year, especially with Ampersand, I learned how to use the engine of the writing to the very best of my ability. It helped a lot that it was me who created that engine, a question I was interested in answering and I hoped that others would be drawn in by.

An example of an essay where I tried to defer the prompt was the "Confederates in the Attic" essay, where the prompt was to talk about how the Civil War began a new revolution in the US. I spent most of my time summarizing the events I had read about and telling about points of views that weren't entirely mine--I think I read about them in the passage that the prompt was based on.

Another example was The Great Gatsby essay. I only talked a little bit about the answer to the prompt in the first paragraph, and then mostly summarize and try to make connections in the rest of the paragraphs. I think I also repeated a lot of the words in that essay, so all the echoes give me a headache now. It's almost the same with my Grapes of Wrath essay, but it seems more disorganized than trying to answer the prompt correctly. There are a lot of quotes and big chunks of quotes in there too.

By the time I got around to Ampersand, I had practically memorized all the writing tips like "vary paragraph lengths" and "watch those -ings". Not to mention, I literally made dozens of drafts of my article, so I had lots of things to look for to change until I got it perfect. I went through countless critiques and revisions, and I'm proud of the final product that went into the published book. It really helped that I was motivated to write the article, and I tried my hardest in everything--writing the driving question, gathering the evidence, staying after school to get critiques... I did a lot.

Though I think I did really well in Ampersand, I know there are still some things I have to work on. When I was writing my article, Sabrina and some others helped me take one of my drafts toward the final by helping me rearrange the entire article because it had very little organization before. It's apparent that I still need to work on my organization and structure, so that's my goal for next year.