Portrait of a Writer Reflection Revised

In my essay, I share with you my experience completing my senior project and the lesson I learned while doing it. Not only did the project give me many challenges to deal with, but it was also interrupted by a tragic car crash the shook the region. Dealing with the stresses of school is one thing, but handling with tragedy is completely different. The car crash unhinged my project in a way I couldn’t have seen coming and it caused me to have to restart my project entirely. To add to the stress of performing well and dealing with death, I also had very restrictive time constraints as graduation was only a couple days away and you can’t graduate if you don’t finish your senior project. In the end, my last minute scramble worked out and I was able to graduate on time. However, I was put into a position where you know you have to keep going and keep working, but all you want to do is stop and let the stress drip off. The lesson I learned during this experience is one that applies to everyone; you can never be truly prepared.

Writing this paper was actually very interesting for me because I was able to learn a lot about my writing. Reading over my first draft was hard; it felt like I was reading one of the worst essays I had ever written. But taking the time to go over my work allowed me to take a step back and refresh my mind and find errors I made and correct them in a way that fit with the guidelines. The writing process that was a part of the guidelines forced me to be more thorough with my work. This was something I would rarely do in high school and it showed me that in a lot of ways I’m a very retrospective writer. One skill that developed most for me was the organization of the narrative. Usually, my stories go all over the place and don’t make much sense. When I write first drafts, I usually write it from my perspective, and I end up leaving out a lot of necessary details and add a lot of unnecessary details. Having better organization and revision processes, I was able to cut out what wasn’t important and refine the parts that were important. Another skill I was able to work on was reading my paper through the eyes of someone else. Doing this during the revision process helps me find mistakes I might have overthought, or find spots where the reader may be very confused or in the blue, requiring me to explain certain details more effectively. Some of the mistakes I found in revision dealt with cohesiveness and repetition. A lot of the sentences told a very simple message in a very lengthy and confusing manner. When I re-wrote these parts, I was able to find shorter and more meaningful ways to convey the same message, like describing what the senior project is. The repetition I found in my essay was all words or phrases I used to describe things. These sentences would usually figure themselves out when I re-wrote them and found better descriptive words.

Two things I think I can work on are the thesis and some descriptive parts like when I was describing the farm. I am not totally confident that my message is clear or that it is hinted at during my essay, but I know that in my writing, I can work on it being more clear and supported by evidence or examples. My paper was supposed to be about tragedy and how it can throw your life of course and that it’s hard dealing with all these stresses at once. The point of sharing my experience with everyone was to articulate the lesson that you can never be fully prepared for every situation you face. With the descriptive parts of my paper, I need to work on finding ways that allow me to effectively write about and present what I’m seeing in my head, in this case I had trouble describing the farm. I believe it ended up sounding good, but I was very uncomfortable writing it, so if I can work on that to the point where I am comfortable doing that, I will have improved greatly. What I attempted to do was narrate how the farm looks in my head, but I got stuck because I wasn’t sure what the best strategy for doing that is. I found a solution that seems to work, but again, I‘m not completely comfortable doing it. In the future, I will work on making a clear thesis and being very descriptive in effective ways.

Overall, I felt that this essay turned out to be pretty good. I was forced to write in a way I wasn’t confident about, but I found along the way that it wasn’t too difficult. I did come across some challenges, but I was generally able to figure out how to solve the issues. Moving on, I want to keep on getting better at organization and description. I feel these are the weakest points of my writing and I hope to be able to fix them soon.