Reading through all my essays, I feel like it is apparent that I have developed as a writer. Although some were easier than others, I feel like I gained some knowledge from each, and I have an idea of what I would do differently next time. 

In my first essay, I had a lot of fun when writing it, and I think that it is apparent in the narrative. It was more engaging for me since I enjoy being able to explore the different tone of writing when I am writing narratives. I can be as dramatic as I want, and it is shown in my narrative with the different spacing and line breaks, similar to those in poems. I used those tools in order to allow the reader to envision the story with the timing that I had in mind when writing. In my narrative I had a line break at “The elderly and their struggles with technology.” I felt like this line was very comedic and having a line break in that moment allowed for the reader to also experience the timing and add some humor into the piece. I think that my narrative was well put together because it met the goal of describing a moment that I experienced development in my literacy and language, while also having a bit of my personal style and fun put into it. I also received peer editing on this piece that made me feel more confident about how I had chosen to write my narrative, since my peer had expressed how much they enjoyed it. (included below)

From my second essay, I went through some struggles writing it. Normally, I feel as though I am skilled at analysis, however, I think I may have overthought the essay itself. I’m used to device driven rhetorical analysis that I use in my writing to show how the author uses the devices to prove their main idea. I felt it challenging to shift the focus onto my own ideas, while still analyzing another writer. I should have expanded on my analysis, but I felt as though I couldn’t separate their ideas from what was supposed to be my own, so I tried not to delve too deep into analyzing the source. There were many things I was unsure about and couldn’t achieve quite as well as I had hoped, so I feel like this was my weakest essay.

For my third essay, writing this was challenging, but I feel like I completed the necessary goal. Again, it was more so understanding the structure we were supposed to be going for in the essay that I had trouble with. I felt more comfortable structuring my essay based on how the ideas flowed better, and I did not want to sound like I was interrupting myself by introducing a new idea in the wrong place. I’m hoping that I understood the synthesis task and did it successfully, although it was a challenging thing to execute. I feel like I made a clear connection between my sources and my ideas, however I’m just not sure if my order was the best it could have been in terms of when I introduced certain ideas. I was debating between switching the order of my sources in order to fit with the synthesis part better, but I ultimately decided against it since I felt like my paragraphs flowed better the way they were. However, next time one thing I feel I would do differently next time would be to switch around the paragraphs if something seemed off and try and explore a different way of formatting. I feel like when I was writing, I based it too strictly on my outline, and did not explore the alternate way I could have formatted, simply because I felt like I had the right idea when writing my outline.