My Greatest Strengths As A Writer

Dear Ms. Vantuno,

It seems crazy that I am already halfway through the school year and have learned so much about myself as a writer. Before taking this class, my greatest strengths as a writer were focusing on my argument, finding the proper evidence to support it, and my creativity, which helped me find different ways to express what I want to write about. Those strengths have helped me in this class and I realize that I have gained many strengths after being in AP Lang for 6 months. For example, I am able to be more concise with my writing and explain my evidence in simpler terms. However, it does not mean that I do not need any more improvement whatsoever. Grammar has been something that I have struggled with and while this class has helped

I hope by the end of the year I can limit the number of grammar mistakes I make in my writing. To accomplish this, I will read over past grammar mistakes in my previous work and look out for them when I am writing something new. Another thing I am quite proud of myself for is my ability to write three essays in two hours and fifteen minutes. If you asked me to do that last year I would tell you it was impossible. Clearly, it is possible. My process for each writing assignment (untimed) is to divide the work evenly so I have enough time to complete it before it is due. For example, with the summer reading rhetorical analysis essay, I set a goal to complete at least a paragraph each night so I would be able to give in my best work. For the timed writing, it required a lot of practice. I would plan out what I would do during the “fifteen-minute reading period” and just start writing. No matter if I did not know what to write, I wrote

For rhetorical analysis, I can support my argument well by finding strong pieces of evidence when it comes to why the author made the choice they did to convey their purpose. However, as I stated earlier, I am not the best at utilizing small details that the author includes, and is reflected in the grade I receive in the evidence and commentary section. When I wrote the synthesis essays, it was the biggest challenge for me as there were so many sources to choose from and it was hard to come up with an argument in a short amount of time. When I “cherry-pick” my evidence, sometimes the evidence that supports my argument does not correlate with the source itself. This is an issue I need to fix as the AP exam is only three months away and I want to improve the argument I create when writing a synthesis essay. Finally, the argumentative essay might actually be my favorite essay to write. I love that I can write about anything which can include books, movies, history, and my life, and be able to support an argument. The only challenging part of this essay was finding a line of reasoning. For example, I had to support the idea of grit on the midterm with my examples being Rachel Berry from Glee and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It is a very odd pair but I somehow made it work. Argumentative essays are less stressful and honestly allow