Blog #11

Culminating Writer's Profile:
1. My expectations about my own writing style and needs have changed since I've begun AP Language and Composition because I now feel obligated to produce higher levels of insight and thought in my writing in less time than ever before. These timed writes are difficult because I must, in a short period of time, thoroughly plan, organize and write a great essay. My writing has changed by becoming slightly simpler and more to the point compared to my previous English classes.
2. Luckily for me, I have always been a fairly strong writer. My parents exposed me to many more higher level books and magazines when I was younger than most of my peers' parents (or so I assume). This greatly increased my vocabulary and showed me many different types of sentence structures. Now, I can look at a sentence and see what is wrong with its structure and what doesn't fit. This helps me greatly in editing my essay as I write.
3. In some ways, my good vocabulary and knowledge of how to use "higher level" words has inhibited the development of my writing. Most of the time, long, flowing lyrical phrases do not suit the purposes of any writing style besides academic. AP Language has allowed me to see the importance of realizing who your audience is and framing the structure of your sentences and your word choice to reflect your audience.

Evaluating Your Writing Process:
1. If I had time to write one more draft of the Rodriguez essay, I would thoroughly edit myself and strengthen my introduction and conclusion paragraphs. I always struggle with the intro to an essay the most, but once I get the ball rolling, the sentences just flow onto the paper with ease. Also, once I reach the end of my essay, I find it difficult to conclude, although it is easier than the beginning. My main goal for a rough draft would be to strenghten these two sections the most and filter out the cliche that is bound to end up in my essays.
2. Unfortunately, due to my missing the origional timed write date due to a cross country meet, I haven't recieced a peer review on this essay.
3. Once again, I haven't revised this essay yet becuase I haven't recieved a peer review.

Evaluating Your Successes:
1. I haven't revised this essay yet.
2. I felt that the strongest part of my essay was my body paragraphs where I fully delved into Rodriguez's reasoning in writing this essay and how he used descriptive language and paragraph structure to shape his theme. Rodriguez's essay was fairly straight forward and it was easy to describe how he did this.
3. I felt that my best success in considering my audience was in my conclusion, where I broadened Rodriguez's theme from California and Mexico's relationship to everyone's relationships.

Being Honest with Self:
1. The most intimidating thing about this writing process was merely beginning. I don't have much experience with timed writes and all the hype and pressure about these essays was getting to me a little. I combatted this by thinking through the subject, Rodriguez's theme and what I wanted to say.
2. Since it is still the beginnning of the year, I wasn't extremely affected by what we've studied as I wrote this essay. However, since all of the essays we read didn't have many adverbs, or many other academic words, I refrained from overusing them.
3. I didn't really have time to think about many other essays while I was structuring and writing mine.
4. I didn't read any other student essays for this essay.
5.  I see myself as a still developing, but fairly strong writier who still has a lot to learn from this class.