Before I took English 11 with Ms. Crowell, I was not a great writer. I never learned a whole lot about writing throughout my years at Galloway. All of my previous English classes were more dedicated to reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary than actually writing. Whenever we learned about writing paragraphs and essays, the concepts still felt confusing and nothing clicked into my brain. Every time a teacher gave me edits on one of my papers, I had no idea how to fix them unless they were punctuation errors or adding/taking away words. While I passed each class with an “A” or a “B”, my writing had not improved that much. By the end of my Junior year English class, I recognized my writing mistake patterns and learned how to improve my topic sentence structure. Every time I turned in an essay and got the final grade, it was either decent, mediocre, or terrible. I have rarely received an “A” grade on my essays and I always wondered why. Halfway through the year, I noticed that all of the comments for my essays were the exact same. The suggestions made by my teachers, especially Ms. Crowell, go under the following categories:
Analyze instead of Summarize
Add more detail
Not relevant to the essay/thesis
Rewrite thesis
With this epiphany, I knew exactly what to avoid when writing future essays. During the second semester, I tried my hardest to use P.E.E. (Point, Evidence, Explain) instead of just summarizing my arguments for my essay on Night by Elie Wiesel. Despite wanting to avoid doing all of my mistakes from the list above, I ended up with sentences like “Throughout the last chapter, Wiesel’s father gets diagnosed with dysentery and slowly gets weaker and weaker, which deeply concerned Wiesel”. I still inevitably kept on making the same mistakes as before. While I still may not know how to fix my mistakes, at least I now know what I need to improve on over the summer when writing my non-Common App college essays.
One of the hardest parts of writing to me is making topic/conclusion sentences, especially when they are thesis statements. I usually had the meat of the paper prepared, but had no ideas on what my argument should be, or how to transition between the points. Before getting help from the teacher on a possible thesis, I usually could not think of anything to write or just made a thesis a lot like the one from my Galloway essay:
Ms. Crowell helped me fix my problem of coming up with effective thesis statements by showing me this method: “Although [counter-argument],[argument]”. This method worked for 90% of my argumentative essays. For example, in my Compare and Contrast essay, I say “Both advertisements may be very effective, but the Nike ad is better than the ad by Popchips because it is more encouraging and targets a larger demographic”. Even though it does not specifically have the word “Although” in it, it is still an effective thesis because it acknowledges the other side of the issue while stating the main opinion. This method also made writing the rest of the paper super easy. Using “Although [counter-argument], [argument], I figured out that the order of paragraphs needed to be a paragraph about the counter-argument, a paragraph about one part of the argument, and a paragraph about the other half of the argument. While I successfully wrote argumentative essays using this method, it backfired on me during the Night essay. This was because there was no real argument or counter-argument in the memoir without guessing information based on the text. Without this method, I would still have a hard time thinking of a thesis statement and have no real argument to base my entire paper on.
So, what was the big takeaway from taking English 11 this year? Without taking the class, I would still be atrocious at writing and have no idea what to do with the given essay prompt. While I am still working on fixing my writing error patterns, I can at least identify them. My writing might not have improved drastically throughout the year, but I at least got past square one.