At the beginning of this school year, I had no interest in writing essays. I did not even know that there were different forms of essays that one could right, such as a narrative essay or compare and contrast. I was just not good at writing in general. I never took the time to really go over my essays that I had written in the past, and did not put the most effort into writing them, not really caring about what I was writing as long as I received a decent grade. However, with each essay that I carefully constructed throughout the course of this year, I realized that putting your ideas and words into a readable form was actually quite enjoyable. I began appreciating the freedom that we had to choose what we wanted to write, and it helped me expand my writing abilities much further.
With those ideas, I learned how to connect them so they made sense in a way that everyone could understand and see the point of why I was writing the essay. I also managed to create a better thesis statement, which allowed the rest of the paper to flow and let my ideas go along with my fingers into the paper. Thesis statements are possibly the most important part of the entire essay, because without a well written one, your readers would not know what your paper is trying to get across, and in turn they would not understand it as well as they could have with a good thesis statement. With that knowledge, one of my biggest goals was to try and create better and smarter thesis statements, increasing my ability to write a thought out, well constructed paper. Quoting and citing were also difficult for me at the start of the year. I did not know how to correctly cite a quote, or how to effectively fit it into my writing. Learning how to cite was easy enough to learn, but incorporating it into a paper was a bit more tricky. I used to just throw a piece of evidence or a quote into my paper, usually into a part where it connected in some form, and hope that the reader could figure it out on their own. Now I know that you as a writer have to make the reader understand how it connects, explaining the evidence that the quote provides and integrate the quote into the overall idea my paragraph is disputing. Passive voice was maybe the most confusing thing that we learned all year. I did not know it existed before learning about it, but after seeing it, I realized how often it appears in my writing and how detrimental it is. It took me awhile until I figured out how to effectively remove it, getting rid of every it, is, and was made papers more concise and less repetitive so the reader would not quickly become bored and stop reading. Every time I read anything, I notice passive voice whenever it pops up, and I immediately think of ways on how the sentence could be enhanced. I think my favorite essay to write would be either the personal essay or the Night essay. Writing the personal essay gave me the ability to write about literally anything I wanted, and with that ability I created the longest essay I had ever written up until that point: over 2,000 words. Of course, I had to shorten it down by over half of that, but the rough draft is most likely my favorite essay I wrote this year, as it was all from my heart and it felt very like me, which was the point of the essay I guess. The Night essay was a close second, mostly because reading the memoir was very exciting, although the content of the story itself was very dark and bleak. The various choices that we had to write about the memoir were very fun, and it was hard to choose, but I think the version I wrote was very well written, although it could be vastly improved. Overall, this was an amazing year for my growth in writing, and I am a tremendously better writer that I was this time one year ago.