Reflective Essay Analysis

My fall term in English challenged me to find interesting topics to write about, define my arguments and ideas more precisely and to support them with details and evidence. The four essays I wrote allowed me to discover parts of my identity that I had not known about until now.

My first essay, the personal narrative, was an open-ended assignment that became the perfect opportunity to give a first impression of who I am as a person to my teacher and peers. I chose to write about squash as it is one of the major areas of my life. The sport encompasses my determination, persistence and my love of competition. Playing squash has helped me grow tremendously and has positively contributed to my moral character, attitude towards life and personal

I understand now that nothing can replace the value squash has in my life, but at the time, I wanted to show another interesting aspect of my life just as special as squash. I chose chess, a hobby of mine that I spent my childhood playing and competing in tournaments. Due to the essay being one that focuses on the description of every single action I made as I played, I focused mainly on creating the image of intensity within the finals where the reader could truly be in my shoes. However, in my enthusiasm to focus on detail, I overlooked an essential element. I failed to inject meaning into the piece. Although I instinctively knew what chess meant to me, I failed to express it explicitly in the piece. Instead I forced the reader to guess what my true message was which hurt my essay. Even though I struggled with this piece, I enjoyed writing it and developing my prose to capture my five senses to describe in detail what I was remembering. Once I received the grade for this paper, I realized my mistakes and for the rest of the term, I knew that I had to focus on not only the type of writing style, but also the deeper message. After this essay I have realized that every aspect of writing has an important role in making the essay great and from that day, I have been focusing on everything as a whole

Not only did I have to persuade my reader using pathos, ethos, and logos, I had to come up with a controversial topic that I was passionate about. This process took a long time because everything I was passionate about didn’t feel like very debatable. As a result, I had to settle for a topic I am not as interested in; the endeavors class and how it should be outdoors. Endeavors, was a class that I found very inefficient in how it presents its goals which is why I believe it needed to change. As I began writing, I had a lot of trouble finding the flow of my piece because I couldn’t relate to it on the same personal level as the others which is why I wasn’t proud of the final product. Although I found a lot of research, and wrote a lot on the topic, the essay would have improved drastically if I had wrote about something more important to my values. However, I did not revise this piece in my final as the topic would be beyond repair and it wouldn’t have been exciting for me to rewrite and scrap the essay as a whole since I would want to come up with another