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!
