Reflective Essay Rough Draft

With the semester at an end, it is a fantastic time to reflect back on the semester and identify areas of growth. While I still have room for improvement on fluency, I have learned to eliminate the verb “to be,” write thesis sentences, and choose better words, and I continue to learn as a writer. Eliminating the verb “to be” removed wordiness and consequently helped improve my fluency. On my Life of Pi rough draft, I had used the verb “to be” when I didn’t actually need it. Subsequently, the resulting sentence felt awkward. After improvement, the revised sentence read: “This creation enables Pi to cope with committing horrific acts in order to survive.” By rewording my sentence, I not only eliminated the word “is,” but I also made the sentence

The thesis statement of my Life of Pi rough draft was originally awkward to read, I couldn’t exactly determine the exact cause, but it felt clunky. Eventually, I managed to correct my thesis to:”Through the character of Richard Parker, the tiger, Pi’s beliefs and motivation, and the absence of measurable time on the lifeboat, Martel portrays the necessity of illusion in order to survive horrific and perilous times.” I showed growth in thesis sentences through the writing process of the Things Fall Apart essay as well. While editing my rough draft, I noticed that my thesis sentence was very misleading; because I had tried to follow the prompt very closely, it appeared that I was supporting the very idea that I was refuting in my essay. After a substantial amount of effort later, the improved thesis statement became: “In Things Fall Apart, Achebe portrays Africa as a civilized continent by showing Igbo culture’s structured justice system, civilized traditions and honorable ceremonies.” This thesis, unlike its predecessor, is much more concise and

During the rough draft of my Life of Pi essay, I used the word “savage” an unacceptable amount of times in my body paragraph, As a result, the paragraph did not flow; the word “savage” appeared in almost every sentence in the rough draft and consequently the fluency was atrociously bad. While revising my essay however, I managed to remove many uses of the word “savage” and replaced it with synonyms such as “animalistic” and “horrific.” As a result, I did not detract anything from my original intent but still managed to make the writing flow better. As usual, my Things Fall Apart essay was also another demonstration of growth in writing through improvement of word choice. On my second rough draft, I had a section describing the event of Okonkwo asking someone for a loan, however I used the word “greets” and “greeting” too many times in the span of a few sentences. The sentence on the final draft became: “Before requesting a loan from Nwakibie, Okonkwo addresses him with a respectful kola nut greeting and gifts a pot of palm-wine.” Although I did not remove all of the uses of the word “greeting” the resulting sentence is much more fluid than