Final Reflective Essay

1.Explain one or two ways my writing has improved (or not). Include a few examples from my posts over time, with analysis and links to the original posts, to illustrate how the improvement(s) happened.
5.What's my usual revision/editing process? How do I go from rough to final draft?
10.Where do I get my ideas for blog post topics? What inspires me to write?



After an entire school year of blogging, i am definitely more comfortable with quickly evaluating and organizing my ideas. I feel that with all this practice responding to so many people and books has made me a more efficient writer. I remember when i could never fully decide which person or quote to respond to, but as time went by, I would be able to respond thoughtfully to just about anything I found.

This is a quote from the beginning of the year, where I responded to Alex Noble.
I remember that response took me a long time to thing. My ideas were all scattered, and I did not know where to start talking. I ended up responding with a really short paragraph about what I thought. Even that one paragraph was extremely hard for me. It took nearly an hour to finally decide what I wanted to write about.

Now that I look at my blog posts, and I realize that I have really improved at writing freely. My last blog post was my final book review on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.
I remember when I did it, I easily pulled out useful quotes out of the book. I would think about significant parts of the book, and instantly remember different parts of the story that ultimately connected. I talked about the main character, Christopher’s, autism. I remember that when I first responded to the story of the Aquatic Uncle, I had major problems finding quotes. This truly proves how I ultimately improved in responding to my books.

I also noticed that I tried to find posts by people I knew , that also talked about topics i could closely relate to, like when I seconded David when he talked about being nervous and when
like when I countered Wendy when she said siblings are not helpful. I think i got my response ideas

“ I have the same bad habits as David. When I read a paper in front on the class, my leg starts moving around like it has its own mind, and my mind tells me to speed up my reading and get it over with. My whole body gets cold, and I get chills down my spine.”

The second I saw that David was talking about being scared while talking in front of an audience, I was instantly inspired to respond, writing on my blog about my experiences with stage fright.

“They may be annoying sometimes, but it may actually be for a reason if you look through it not only your own eyes. My life would definitely be a life of boredom and a life of always messing up in life without my two brothers’ love and help.”

Again, I responded with my personal experience. I talked briefly about how my brothers have made a positive impact in my life, and how I think siblings are actually not just plain annoying.

Another way I have been inspired to write on my blogs is when I wrote about my desired superpower

”If I had a super power it would be the ability to create an item by visualizing it in your mind.”

I was inspired to talk about this through the movie, Inception. I remembered how the characters in the dreams were allowed to dream up anything they wanted, which was super cool, so I blogged about it. When I was writing about this, I was also thinking about the science behind this superpower, if there is any. The more I thought about this superpower, the more I liked it. I felt more and more connected to it.  

Usually, my editing process starts off with goings over my latest rough draft to find grammar and spelling mistakes. Sometimes, I can even see obvious details I can remove and add, but this does not usually happen until I finish reading my entire draft from top to bottom. This is because I need to remember and think about what i have already said, and if I should move the ideas around to make it flow. After looking at all the grammar and spelling mistakes, I would usually try to add more points if necessary. This usually means more quotes and analyses. In the end, I may even sprinkle the near-finished draft with some transitions or even some stronger verbs.

On one occasion, I even make the mistake of leaving an entire conclusion out. This happened when I was doing my first rough draft of the book review on The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night-time. Luckily, I had a peer point it out, something that is always helpful. I also needed the conclusion because I was panicking about my final draft being under the required count of 1000 words. In my final draft of the book review, I polished it by adding the conclusion and cleaning up the formatting.

I truly believe that blogging is a really good tool to practice writing. It helps people become more comfortable with what they are writing about. I saw major differences in how I wrote my blog posts over time. I started off slow and unsure, but now, I have become more comfortable writing what comes to mind. I have noticed that this extra practice has also helped me in my Writing One course. I find it easier to organize an essay now than it was in the front of the year. This extra practice also helped me realize where I usually make mistakes, allowing me to noticed them more frequently. This leads to me being able to prevent producing the same mistakes in the future. Overall, I think that this new way of teaching is really great, especially when the teacher of those students is you, a considerate, encouraging, and helpful person.

P.S. Thank you for spending this year helping me improve my writing skills, and I wish you the best of luck to your teaching career, no matter if it is at ASTI or somewhere else.

Reflective Essay

Reflective Essay

    Blogging on the web is one of my favorite types of homework styles since I choose my own topics to write about, but narrowing down to one subject per post might be challenging sometimes. Another problem I have come by when writing is writer’s block, or a period of time where you become stuck and can not think of new ideas. Blogging has definitely changed how I write, like how I can spill an essay out of my mind that also flows and makes sense. I love the idea of blogging for homework since I could think of the blog topics at the top of my head and just write them. Plus, I have noticed my areas of struggle, and how I could decrease the amount of times that I stop to ponder about my ideas.
    Usually, I respond to other people’s post that I can connect to and write about, but when I do a free topic, I would write about something we had a quick write on during class like my post about which superpower I wanted or a fresh new topic that I had ready in my mind to talk about like when I wrote about my all time favorite thrill ride. When I did my post about my quick write, I only took the base and idea of it since what I wrote in my composition book wasn’t a fully though out piece of writing. As for my idea for the thrill ride, I wanted to talk about something I enjoyed in my life, so what better topic to write about than roller coasters? Thinking of a new topic to write about was harder than having a brain stormed quick write or a self expressing response post, but it is definitely more fun to remember what fun I had back at that time, and how I long those days of summer days I had in Universal Studios.
    The thing that gets me to write is the clock that ticks every second, mocking me and my resemblance of a snail. My wait until the last day to do homework has been haunting me ever since I was in sixth grade for I hate the boredom of doing homework so much that my mind randomly picks out anything and everything distracting to keep me from concentrating. This constant distraction usually stops when I get my work rolling, but that takes too much time that I generally don’t have. This leads me into my problem with writer’s block.
    Stopping and Starting my work is an extremely inefficient way of working, but it sometimes happens without noticing. Normally I stop to think every time I need a stronger choice of vocabulary to choose to, so I always have a tab just for the thesaurus. I tend to dwell on this problem for a long time since it takes me a while to find my so called “perfect word” that fits marvelously inside the text. Sometimes I would go onto the thesaurus online and look up a synonym for the word, but my fastidiousness would have me traveling page to page, looking for a word that does not even exist in the English language. When this happens, I feel like a failure for I had spent at least five minutes trying to look for the word, and I ended up with the word I found in the first five seconds of the impossible search.
    Ordinarily, I get myself unstuck by zapping myself with a gun of realization, pulling me out of the never ending wild goose chase for intelligence in my preference of words, but sometime it would take me an hour or two to realize that I have totally drove off track. It would sometimes take me an hour or two mainly because of my quickness to get distracted by random things that suddenly become way more interesting than the original thing I was supposed to be doing, homework. I have figured out that my mind practically can not understand and process homework until about eight or nine o’ clock at night, with an exception of extremely important assignments that require an enormous amount of time like projects and essays. This would lead me to work until midnight or as late at three in the morning. Sleeping at three a.m. gives me only four out of the eight hours of sleep a normal human being my age requires when I wake up at seven in the morning to go to school. This procrastination leads to decreased amount of sleep which in turn leads to yawning during class all day and drowsy eyes that have troubles staying open, which in turn leads to poor attention towards class and lowered knowledge of vital information taught by the teacher.
    I love the idea of blog posting since this allows everybody in all of the classes to read, respond, and even share the piece of wordy art. Responses that other classmates post help give another point of view of the original piece like how I responded to Shiyun’s post about how people refer to each other as friends and how each friend is grouped and treated differently. I responded to her post by saying how I label people and how I, personally, treat them. These past two and a half months of weekly blogging has taught me how to go with the flow of writing, and confidently talk about any subject that is on my mind.
I have noticed how I can whip out three paragraphs of a topic easily within an hour.
    As for now, my main goal is to stop procrastinating on my homework, and I know that it will take way more effort to actually follow this rule than to simply say it. I think that without procrastination of homework in my life, everything would be easier. From waking up, to being awake and safe when biking to school, to paying attention at school, and to my own personal health, doing my homework earlier will only result in positive results.