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Grace Butler

Becky Hsu

R1A Sec. 26

5 December 2019

My Journey as a Writer

As a new, overachieving college student in a six unit english class, I did what every other

person in my position would do and spent way too much time stressing about my first essay of

the year. It was a critical response paper (CRP) on climate change and in my eyes, ended up

turning out as relatively mediocre. I felt as if I tried too hard to “sound smart” on the rough draft

that it made me question my grammar and sentence structure. I focused more on individual

words or sentences rather than the paragraph as a whole in relationship to the thesis and purpose

behind the entire essay. I introduced my counter-argument with “Although Kolbert and I see any

change as a step in the right direction to saving our world, others may argue that global warming

is just a test of innovation and will be something we work through naturally.” Looking back at

this sentence, I feel like it was a very basic setup and can be revised into something more

advanced; for example, “Although Kolbert and I perceive climate change as a global crisis

needing to be tackled from any direction, others may believe that it is only a test of innovation

and will be something we will naturally work through.” Just with this one sentence, I feel that it

elevates the paragraph as a whole and sounds more mature while still serving its purpose as a

counter-argument. Besides “playing it safe” with this essay, I had verb tense issues that detracted

from the overall clarity of the essay. Before revising the essay, I originally said “havoc was still

taking place…” instead of “havoc is still taking place.” Although I was talking about a past event
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and the actions being taken to counteract climate change, it is still ongoing and therefore present

tense. From that point on, I became more aware of my occasional verb tense issues and make a

conscious effort to look for them when initially writing and revising my own literary works.

A few essays later, we were assigned a synthesis paper with some of the same sources as

the CRP. The synthesis essay was derived around a central idea with support from multiple

sources whereas the critical response paper was meant to be a summary of a source and then

responded to with a personal analysis. At first I was concerned that the synthesis essay would

sound too similar to the CRP because both were thesis-driven and contained one of the same

sources, but I quickly realized the difference between the assignments. Although a longer essay

with a tougher thesis to prove, I felt like it ended up being much more advanced and academic

than the first essay. With the synthesis paper, I tried to slowly and logically flow through my

ideas. The hardest part was tying all the sources into one cohesive essay, intertwining the

arguments into one another. Even though I tried my best to not get ahead of myself when writing

the essay, the main feedback I received was that I made a few claims that remained baseless until

I explained them in the next paragraph or occasionally a few paragraphs later. This was shown in

my original draft’s second paragraph when I ended it by explaining that Kolbert’s solution does

not “[gather] the necessary support to tackle climate change” (2) in which I do not fully backup

until two paragraphs later. Even going back and revising the essay, I still struggled with

supporting it in the paragraph with the original claim. Although still difficult, I am now aware of

this type of error and will continue to work on it when proving theses with extensive amounts of

logic and sources required to support it. Despite that downfall, I was very pleased with the

paragraph on page five connecting Greta Thunberg and Jonathan Foley. Not only did I have the
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ability to layer my logic and clearly get my point across about the affinity between the two

environmentalists, I did so by using my own outside knowledge on a relevant and modern-day

example.

Finally, the last essay of this portfolio, ​Roles in a Dystopia, ​was definitely my riskiest and

most complicated essay. I had merged parts of two prompts into one, partially creating my own

when doing so. I took a new approach to the main characters of both novels by incorporating

their differences into a critical analysis on their disregard for gender roles in a dystopia. Since

there was so much logic that needed to be embedded in the body paragraphs to support my

thesis, they came out fairly long and a little broad. When I revised it for this portfolio, I tried my

best to split them up and reorganize it in a practical way that still held a continuity of ideas

within the essay. This was a fairly large revision I had to make and at first I was upset about

having such a big issue this late in the semester, but it is all part of the learning process. Even

though it was not perfect, I realized that my writing was elevated to a point in which I could take

a completely new spin to both books and really challenge myself as a writer. The growth that I

achieved between my first “safe” essay and this “risky” one was far more than I ever expected in

my first semester of college.

In retrospect, I feel as if my writing style has become more cohesive and I can clearly and

easily get my thoughts onto the page. In general, I am extremely grateful for what this class did

for me as a writer, critical analyzer, and close reader. Although labor intensive and essay

extensive at times, this class gave me much more confidence to take risks with my writing and

analyze literary works through different perspectives.