Reflective Essay

               

It’s Good to be Me

            Everything is for a purpose I suppose. That’s probably why every assignment we have been expected to accomplish isn’t just for our teacher to obtain some cruel entertainment from our hard work. Its main goal is to progress. Discover who we are as a writer, a friend, student, or just an individual person. As we eased our way throughout the year, our main destination was progression in thoughts, feelings, organization, and comprehension of what our topics were. We weren’t allowed to merely squeeze ourselves through writing an intro consisting of a few lines or just one or two paragraphs summarizing our book. It was more than that. Now we were at the point. Have to understand the mind of the author and be put into someone else’s shoes. Although the difficulty increased profoundly as the year advanced, I made my way into truly understanding who I was through the way that I portrayed myself through the medium of writing. Developing my tone, my style, my use of diction just made me more of a unique person. As this endless array of improvements weaved their way into my writing, my works began to have something worthwhile to evaluate. Meaning and organization, theme and “so what’s” were finally becoming clear in my essays; something that had never navigated its way into my thoughts.  

            In my personal essay, I realized that I had no restrictions or limitations. YAY!!! It’s all about me! Informalities were allowed and everything didn’t require picture perfect sequences or thoughts. It all depended on me, who I was, and how I wanted to speak my mind. It felt like I was a little toddler set loose from my jail-like playpen. For once, I didn’t have to think of someone else and what they thought; this piece only concerned me. This freedom provided a great shoulder of support for me when I began to write. My ideas began to flow out of my brain and onto my laptop screen. Everything was simpler because I was fully able to describe myself, my feelings and thoughts. In this piece, the way that I said, “But it sucks because my desire to have more is always an irresistible feeling which gives me the feeling of helplessness,” was really amusing to me because it was so different than every other essay I had composed. The lack of “formal” words was just another addition in our freedom leading us to go and show off our voice and who we are.

            For me, writing a literary analysis is much easier than argumentative or other styles such as compare and contrast. Although I never challenged myself as much as I would have liked, I felt I was in a comfortable place writing my lit analyses. Observing the thought that the author tries to convey in their writing and proving a point. Focusing on the small details and expanding on them creating a bigger thought. Although somewhat similar to an argumentative when it comes to conveying a main point or idea, these essays are structured around cognitive thinking and going a little deeper to dig out a meaning that the author is trying to say. In my piece about Edgar Allan Poe from the short story unit, I greatly observed how his life before impacted his behaviors and attitudes that are reflected in his numerous stories. As I explain how in his childhood, his family was torn apart due to the death of his parents, leading him to be forced “to write using negative connotations and by perceiving the world as an atrocious environment for human development”. Although he uses positive words to portray the feline in his story The Black Cat, he describes it at first to be very beautiful, yet he reciprocates its original behavior to being cruel and evil. In this piece, I felt I had greatly advanced from a normal point by point structure of an essay to actually going in depth to explain more of the general attitude of someone and what has impacted this in the first place. By organizing my evidence and main idea, I was able to clearly define my thoughts. Giving good evidence has also been difficult, but actually explaining why it is so significant was also a killer for me. I have tried to make advancements in trying to totally go full circle when I am explaining something instead of just leaving the reader hanging in the middle.

            As this year went on and more and more prompts were given to us to write about, when I heard about the word sketch, my eyes were fully open and ready to work. Although a smaller project than most we had done so far, this piece by far was my favorite. Being descriptive, although sounding to be a simple task, can require some real dedication. That’s why I actually observed closely the leaf that I was going to write about. I thought from a different perspective. What would it think and feel being a product of nature? Diction was a main focus in this assignment, where by words we were to convey the feelings of the object. Words make a big difference, as they can create a visual for a reader to base their interpretations on. As being my strength in writing, diction easily weaved itself into my description of the leaf. Sometimes, however, I went to deep in description which led to some unclear thoughts and jumbled up ideas. The logical development and order of my piece was sometimes confusing to the reader such as when I described  “The vine like stem of support breaks off and becomes disowned from the family leaf”, which obviously didn’t make sense, because in the first sentence, I created the image that this leaf was “Lying alone in the ruffling sharp blades of grass, it billows around along with its peers fearlessly”, which meant that it never was on a tree to begin with, so how can I jump to a whole new idea? Some moments like this slipped into my paper, but I caught them and revision greatly helped to fix these blurred interpretations to make a little more sense.

                With my compilation of essays throughout this year, I have realized that I have developed into a more mature writer who once was afraid of speaking her mind and expressing her thoughts and ideas fearlessly. Seeing a clear development in my voice, my style, and ideas has greatly inspired me to aim higher. Although my essays are not pitch perfect, they are climbing the steps slowly of improvement, as there is still much more to be made. I feel that I am defined better in my pieces than I was before; my thoughts actually matter now. I have learned not to be influenced by others and their works, because I am who I am, I like this me with new philosophies to offer to my readers.