Reflective Essay Sample about Writing
Writing provided me with an avenue to expand my imagination. In the sixth grade, we had the opportunity to write a small fiction book with the sky as our limit. It was a struggle for me to decide what I was going to write about in the beginning. I used to think of books as equivalent to movies because every time I read fiction, I would visualize it and it would play a movie in my head. The exception was that books had more detail and more emotion in the character’s thoughts. I wrote a book called Arista, it was about this magical land and a group of friends that lived in it. It was my biggest piece of writing to date. I was the most confident about the creativity in my writing when I finished the book.
The second time I was confident in my writing was my junior year in high school. I was taking AP Language and Composition with Mr. D. We wrote argumentative essays, rhetorical analysis essays, synthesis essays, and integrative essays. My favorite was the rhetorical analysis essays because they allowed me to see what types of rhetoric the author was using and how they affected me while reading the literature. During this period my teacher challenged me to better my writing and with constant practice, I improved greatly. I passed my AP Language and Composition test and was given college credit for it. This was the peak of my technical writing. I was confident about the content and technicality of my writing.
Mr. D. was the teacher who helped me most with my writing. I knew he truly cared about me improving my writing and he created a safe space where I felt like I could be imperfect and that is okay because he will help me with my mistakes. He would constantly push me and give me constructive criticism. My writing pieces are now looked over and edited by my mom. She is the only family member I share my writings with. She mostly looks over my scholarship essays and not in-class assignments. I do not like to share my writing with anyone when it is personal writing. I am more comfortable sharing my writing when it is more nonfictional and technical writing for example essays based on a book. However, I anticipate sharing my personal statement for medical school with a handful of people which will be out of my comfort zone but is necessary.
I believe my greatest strength as a writer is my vocabulary and sentence structure. I like to edit papers rather than compose them because I can rearrange a sentence to have a better flow, but I struggle to write the content of the sentence in the first place. My weaknesses as a writer are that I can be “wordy” and have long run-off sentences. I think I have mediocre transitions that I would like to strengthen. My goal is to get back to the writing I was accustomed to my junior year in high school. I want strong sentence structure, transitions, reflection, story-telling ability, and appropriate word choice. I hope to become a better writer all around and not be anxious when I need to write a paper.
My writing process involves a considerable amount of procrastination. I first look at the prompt and start brainstorming in my head what I could write about. I like to link general topics to the prompt before thinking about specific narrowed details. Once I have the topics, I organize them into paragraphs. For example, with my personal statement, I know in the first paragraph I want to talk about taking care of my grandma. In the second paragraph, I want to talk about my volunteering. Then in the third paragraph, I want to talk about my shadowing experience. Lastly, my conclusion will state why I am a great candidate. After I have this general paragraph outline, I then start writing and I am not worried about my beginning sentence having a hook or if my sentences flow. My focus at this point is getting content and ideas down that I can then move around and establish a flow. Then I look for overuse of the words really and very. I have a bad tendency to add really and very to already strong adjectives that are unnecessary. Then I spell and grammar check it and have another person read over it to edit it.
