Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Caesar and Alchemist Essay Reflection


Ideas and Content
I believe that my Alchemist essay has a lot more ideas and content to support it's facts. My Alchemist essay was a lot better crafted than my Caesar essay since I was able to provide more information and support for my ideas and my thoughts were therefore much more developed. This might because the teachers helped us a lot on the Alchemist essay and they reviewed our drafts while we barely had any help on the Caesar essay and only wrote one draft. This allowed me to edit my work a get suggestions on my Alchemist essay while I was not able to do this on my Caesar essay. I was able to explain my quotes and examples well in my Alchemist essay, but I didn't support them enough in my Caesar essay. I believe that I am better at factual writing rather than expository writing as I received a better grade on my DBQ essay that I wrote without help, than my Caesar essay. I also believe my DBQ paragraph was overall better written than my Caesar one. I could improve my writing by giving more support for my quotes and other examples.

Organization
I think that my writing is overall organized well as I am able to organize my essays into the required number of paragraphs and put my paragraphs into the different parts. I am able to begin with an introductory paragraph with a hook and a thesis statement in my Alchemist essay as well as my Caesar essay. I have clear topic sentences in all my paragraphs but I could make them more interesting to keep the reader's attention. I could improve on establishing a context to my quotes as I usually put the context after the quote and sometimes forget to give a context at all. In the Alchemist essay I was able to include transitions and summarizations of paragraphs for the body paragraphs but I didn't include these things in some of my Caesar paragraphs. I also believe that my conclusion was strong in my Alchemist essay but was lacking in my Caesar one. This might be because I had a lot more time to write the Alchemist essay but I had to rush the ending to the Caesar essay.

Personal Growth
I don't believe that I have grown much as a writer between the two essays since I was not able to match my level of depth and understanding in my Caesar essay, as my Alchemist essay. I believe that my writing level has stayed about the same since although I got a worse grade on the Caesar essay, I had a lot less time to write and edit it, and didn't get it checked over either. Also the expectations of the teachers has grown throughout the year and I was expected to be able to write in more detail for the Caesar essay.

SLR's
I believe that I have to be able to communicate effectively when I write an essay as I need to be able to explain and communicate my thoughts clearly and effectively for the reader. If I cant communicate my point across to whomever is reading my piece of work, they wont be able to enjoy it or even understand it. Every piece of writing has a point that it is written for and if that point cannot be communicated to the reader, the writing is useless.

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