Reflection

     I was one of those girls who walked into AP Lang and believed that I was a strong writer and that I could get far in life based on that skill.  I was wrong.  After the first assignment, my confidence diminished and I knew that Mrs. Smith needed to teach me how to write an essay.  I feel like my writing progression includes actually reading over what I wrote, more creative examples, and being able to have insight about what I am writing about.  When I first writing about the random, thinking of examples to make a convincing argument seemed impossible.  Now, I am able to go back through my outline and feel pleased with how it will turn out.  I still need to work on word choice and flow, but at least I have the material to construct an argument.
     The fact that the assignments were quirky and creative helped me develop a style.  Learning about the different types of essays exposed me to a variety of ways of writing which was definitely helpful.  To be honest, the most meaningful assignment was probably the research paper.  That paper was absolute death-especially if you procrastinated it as much as I did, missed three days of school in the process, and ended up doing zero annotations.  The assignment actually taught me how to read scholarly journals, get real opinions on novels, decipher the main point of the novel, synthesize sources, and write a 5-7 page paper.  The main lesson I learned from the research paper is how to budget time.  I also grew as a writer, seeing it much easier to find the argument of a novel.  I mentioned this in last semester's reflection, but my mom who went to Westminster had an amazing writing teacher.  She still tells me about her teacher will find a random sentence every day from a random person's paper and pick on a different student to revise it with the class. Writing drills such as that one will keep our minds focused on writing and inspired to improve every day.