Narrative Essay On Making Mistakes

“Failure is success in progress,” This quote brought by the brilliant mind-shattering theoretic physicist Albert Einstein means many things to me. When I was a young child my mind would race thinking about failure in my written essays. I would strictly focus on the critics' educators would give me, and not the positive feedback that many showed. As I am an adult, I have learned to embrace failure. That it is okay to make mistakes, to take them and craft a solid essay using comments from educators. Within this semester some of the strong moments within my essays were utilizing descriptive language to paint details of my essays, strong conclusions, and solid attention grabbers within my introductions. While there were many positives within my essays, a few things that I require improvement on is using proper word choices and providing a thorough analysis of the textual examples cited.  What I learned from this course is to embrace my strengths as a descriptive writer while making sure I fully understand the word choices I choose and citations.

The Narrative essay was the first essay assigned in this course,  countless themes were provided for students to choose from that piqued their interests. I chose “The world around You” theme with the prompt of A school Event. In this essay, I told the story of Prom day with its preparations and events that followed. While writing this essay, I made sure to take my time using descriptive words. I wanted to paint the image of every minuscule detail that one could think of. I wanted the readers to visually feel that they were accompanying me throughout the day. For every sentence, I tried using descriptions such as color and size. I even told my car's name, brand, and model for full description. That any reader can be brought back to the mind of an anxious high schooler awaiting their big night. While reviewing the feedback on this essay, I could visually see that my hard work paid off. Dr.Horton gave the feedback that quotes “ You utilize descriptive language and include detail to paint a vivid picture for the reader”. After hearing this useful response, For the following essays, I tried to be as descriptive as possible to paint images in readers' minds.

Next, was the Analysis Essay. The main goal of this essay was to successfully identify and analyze the prompt given. While choosing between the options I found myself having greater difficulty compared to the first writing. Constantly overthinking to myself if I even could analyze the virtual article. While I may have “thought” I have created a semi-decent essay.  Re-analyzing my essay and the comments Dr.Horton has provided showed me my errors and mistakes within. The first feedback given was my word usage within the intro paragraph. While using the word enthuses, Dr.Horton stated “Word choice? What do you mean by "enthuses"? What is Ivins' argument?”. After re-reading the sentence with this specific word usage, I concluded that it was indeed not the correct word choice to show an analysis of the Authors Argument. I used the word simply because of its more intelligent look. While thinking that using a more basic word choice would not prove my credibility as a writer. What I did not realize is that I did not fully understand the meaning and definition of enthuses. So re-reading the sentence as a whole did not make any sense. The next feedback comment was my use of quotes and analysis. For one of my many quotes, Dr. Horton proved the feedback of “we must consider whether or not Ivins is being serious or using sarcasm. Think about how much of her article is spent supporting/proving the efficacy of knives. She only mentions it in the opening paragraph, likely as an attention-getter. However, its presence does help to support her argument, though not directly.”  What I learned from this comment is that I need to reread and truly understand the author's tone within the writing. While not understanding the author's tone of sarcasm, the quote I provided did not provide much relevance to the author's argument.

To continue, The Second to Final essay that was provided in this course was the compare/contrast essay. The goal of this essay was to use the “Compare/contrast/synthesis” while specifically using the prompt of  “ what it means to be human”. While writing this essay, I wanted it to be clear that I have read through the comments Dr.Horton has provided and I wanted to show understanding with analysis and with my quotes and citations. I reread the “Declaration of Independence” multiple times until I understood the meaning and tone. Then carefully compared how the American people felt and experienced while being under the control of Britain. After analyzing the comments by Dr. Horton, I saw that there was an improvement in my analysis and quotes. The feedback read “Strong analysis of relevant quotes from the text in this paragraph!” This made me ecstatic and jump with joy as I worked on correcting my previous needs for improvement.  Though I did have some things I must continue to work on, such as my thesis statement and sentence fragments.

To conclude, What I learned from this course is what my strengths and weaknesses truly are. That I must embrace my strengths of descriptive language, to paint images within the reader's mind to hopefully show scenes and to clear confusion within the reader's perspective. While also working on my weaknesses by fully re-reading the context provided to confirm the authors' tone usage and relevance to the authors' argument. I also learned that I shouldn't put so much pressure on myself for not understanding certain readings and arguments, for I am not perfect. With a combination of using my strengths and fixing my weaknesses, I can hopefully write strong essays in my future classes and prove my credibility as an author.