Portrait of a Writer Reflection
My essay was about my experience doing my senior project, which was the last graded work I did for my school. What made my experience unique was that it was unfortunately disrupted by a sudden car accident that shook my entire region. Because of the car accident, I couldn’t finish my project on time, so I had to find a way to finish it before graduation. The solution was for me to research different institutions about my topic and write a paper about it. This turned out to be very hard to do in the short time I was given. My last minute scramble worked out in the end and I was able to graduate with my class and move on to my next adventure. But the overall 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 to me. Reading over my first draft was hard; it was one of the worst things 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 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 because when I write the first draft, I usually write it from my perspective, which leaves out a lot of necessary details and adds a lot of unnecessary details. Another benefit of going over my work was being able to read my essay in someone else’s point of view that also helped me to reveal some of the mistakes I made. Some of the mistakes I found 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. It was supposed to be about how I wasn’t prepared to have to deal with the deadly car accident and the mess it made with my project. The readers were supposed to take away that you can’t be one-hundred percent prepared for anything. There will always be something unexpected to throw you off. With the descriptive parts, I need to work on finding ways that allow me to effectively write about and present what I’m seeing in my head (the farm). I tried to narrate what I would see if I was walking into the farm, but I was completely unfamiliar with doing it. I felt like I could write five pages just about what’s on the farm. For this essay I needed to describe the farm in a short manner and I found that to be difficult.
Overall, I felt that this essay turned out to be pretty good. I wasn’t completely comfortable with the writing style, 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.
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