WrAP-Up Part one 4.27.12

Lauren Scott
Dr.deGravelles
English I {block 4}
April 27, 2012

Year-Long Process Writing Reflection Drafting
“Writing WrAP Up”

  As incoming freshman in high school and a very prominent English student throughout past years I learned so much this year in my English I class and grown as a writer in so many ways. I have never been so challenged in my writing until this year’s English class. This year I wrote a literacy narrative, profiling, literary analysis, and a research {global issues} paper. Our class was also assigned in the beginning of the year writer’s notebook entries but starting in January of 2012 we started blogs to replace our writer’s notebook entries. There has always been consistent writing assignments throughout the year giving us many opportunities to grow as writers and transition from middle school writing to high school writing.

  I was content and surprised at my WrAP total score of 23 and scale score of 1159. I thought that I had done a lot worse than I actually did. My weakest points of my WrAP writing were sentence structure and mechanics.  While my strongest point of my WrAP writing were overall development, organization, support, and word choice. I feel that my WrAP writing truly portrays my weakest points in all of my main writing such as papers but also my smaller writing such as blog posts. During the WrAP I tried to use some of the techniques that I have been taught in class like thinking and reading like a writer by having perspectives on my writing to help broadening the abilities to write on the topic I was given.

  Looking back on my papers throughout the year I saw a trend in my grades. My grades got lower as the types and processes of papers we wrote became harder. The first paper I wrote was the literacy narrative essay I missed the main point of writing a literacy narrative. I made the essay more of a profile of my father with a few paragraphs about my literacy narrative. I did poorly with conventions and organization on this essay. “…Does not go beyond the minimum to offer insight into your writing process…” was the critique given by Dr.d that stood out the most to me because all I did was try and get the bare minimum for the essay and it completely shows.

  Where I lacked in the literacy essay I made up for in my profiling paper. The profiling paper is by far best paper I have written this year. I hit the mark on every technique that we have studied for our writings this year. The techniques for writing that we’ve studied this year are organization, ideas, word choice, sentence fluency, voice, and conventions. I did very well on this paper because it gave me a chance to show a lot of my strongest technical points like imagery, a profiling subject, and fluency of story line sentences, and emotion in my voice. I also got very positive feedback from Dr.d on this paper saying, “Great drafts Lauren. You have a clear and interesting perspective that pulls us through the paper.”

  The two most challenging papers, for me, were the literacy analysis and research {global issues} papers. A word for the wise never pick Christmas themed short story they’re very hard to analyze and just bad news for a literacy analysis paper. “Lauren, I know this paper had been a struggle for you” was the comment that Dr.d gave me on my l and was the most important because ‘a struggle’ for the literacy analysis paper is the understatement of the century. I had such a terrible time with this paper so after a certain point I just gave up which was careless and childish of me. For the global issues research paper I had an interesting topic and great rough drafts. But when I got to the final draft one of my strongest points of literary techniques, voice, I used an emotional voice rather than a factual and formal voice in my paper. I have been working on the distinction of my voice in papers lately though. I failed to correctly and precisely edit my paper which just carelessness on my part. Even though I struggled the most with these two papers I learned the most and they will help me as a writer.

  As freshman year comes to a close looking back on all of my writing I remembered the process I went through on each paper. I remembered going to see Dr.d at tutorial and sometimes afterschool to make sure my drafts made sense with our literary techniques and the overall goal of the paper. I learned that you must edit your paper as many times as possible before going in for a final draft, always organize and pre-draft because organization is easy points, and if you really don’t know what to do for any of your papers go online and read around and research your paper’s goal and purpose or ask Dr.d!