My Writing Reflection

At the beginning of the school year, I would consider my writing very strategic and organized. Freshmen year, I was taught to use the “evidence sandwich”, and continued to use that structured outline throughout the next few years. This year, my writing has shifted from being very structured to being a little bit more personalized. I began to incorporate a lot of my opinions and understandings into my writing pieces instead of sticking to the facts like I was taught to in past years. Looking back at my essays from this year, I can see a clear difference in quality between the topics that I enjoyed and the ones I didn’t. I also remember a reoccuring struggle that stumped my writing on almost every essay I wrote this year. Throughout the numerous

I was very unclear on the instructions, and really struggled to find something to write about. The next essay we were assigned to write was the Crucible narrative. I remember having a very hard time choosing what to write about, but I ended up getting very deep into the topic I chose. That essay was a little harder to write because of the topic, but it was very organized. It is easy to see and be able to pull out the structure from essays I wrote early in the first semester because of how I had previously learned to write. When looking at essays I wrote in the second semester, I am able to see a structural shift. My essays have developed from less structure focused pieces into more content focused pieces. I think the essay that captured my writing strengths the most was the synthesis essay. I had become so intrigued with the issue of racial disparity when reading an essay written by James Baldwin. I had so many ideas to incorporate in that essay, and we were given a structure to base the essay off of. Since this structure was different from the one I had previously used, I was able to focus more on the content I wanted to write about and later format it, rather than basing my writing on a

I clearly remember taking days to figure out what idea I wanted to focus on and analyze for the Gatsby Analytical essay. There were so many important themes and motifs scattered throughout the book, and I couldn’t choose just one to write about. When I did choose one, I would begin writing my essay, but usually the next day I will either find I dislike this topic or come up with another theme to write about. For that essay, I ended up writing about the significance of the green light in The Great Gatsby, and that ended up being the most interesting topic for me to write about, but it took me too many days to decide on what to write about. The main issue ended up being that I spent too many days deciding what to write about when I could have been actually writing the essay. I ended up having to cram and write very fast, which resulted in an poor grade. This obstacle is something I need to continue to work on, but I learned from my mistake on the analytical essay and applied this to the synthesis