Reflective Essay On Rhetorical Analysis

Words: 527
Pages: 3

The very first essay grade I received back in that class was the summer homework. It is now safe to say, I was not as strong of a writer as I thought myself to be. In that essay, I realized that I did not thoroughly check my papers for grammatical and punctuation errors as well as I should. Basically, I was too lazy to proof read my own papers before submitting them to teachers. Also, within that essay, I was scrutinized relentlessly for the numerous amounts of vague statements I used to use in my writing which also carried into my initial in-class essays. For example, I often found myself using the word it and not further explaining who the "it" was I was referring to. Progressing away from the things I got away with my tenth and ninth grade …show more content…
On a consistent basis, my grade earned would fluctuate from a 4 and a 5 depending on the rhetorical strategies I used. Some days I got lucky with an easy essay and other truly exposed my areas of needed improvement. To this day, I still need improvement in knowing more possible rhetorical strategies in general and being able to apply those to the prompt. Shifting from rhetorical essays back to open ended in March, I began to earn better scores; however, I was using a very formulaic manner of writing. In each essay, I would start the paragraph off with the main idea, quote, and then analysis. Yes, this formulaic manner of writing did bring in consistent scores of a 6, but my language was restricted as the format of that writing didn’t allow for me to implement it. Going further down the road, in April I was able to break my formulaic way of writing and adapted controlled ways of implemented my ideas with structure. At this point and time, the AP test was approaching and I had broken majority of the major writing habits with minor defects still existing. I had finally become the AP Lang student I hoped for. I truly did learn a lot of errors that are obvious to identify in my old writing. I mean c'mon, did you read the last half of