Over the last seven weeks of this semester, we have studied various forms of writing. These writings include perspective paper, research paper and a personal narrative writing and summary/strong response. Now as the semester ends, an opportunity to reflect back on the various skills acquired and tasks accomplished is appropriate. I am confident that the tasks that I did wholeheartedly with total regard for their importance ultimately came through as my best assignments.
I mention here that the three most comprehensive works that highlight my personality as a writer are my research paper, personal narrative and finally the perspective paper. These three works embody a soul that raises them from the classification of mere words because they depict my thinking process transport the reader to a vivid context of the respective topic in the paper.
Out of the three outstanding works, the perspective paper comes first. It was an interesting assignment where we had to choose an abstract location and describe its scenery. The whole exercise took twenty to thirty minutes overall and I am proud of my final perspective paper.
A key attribute that makes the paper so appealing and worthy of mention is my use of action verbs in my description. The phrase, “the leaves noticeably moved lazily forth and backward in perfect rhythm with the swaying of the tree branches in a never ending oscillation as the wind gently blew”, brings out the exact picture of the simple picture of a leaf movement, and the reader actually sees through the words the leaf moving. I am grateful for the writer’s toolbox that gave me a large arsenal of tools and tips to tackle the assignment effectively. Another phrase is “The grass felt crisp, wet and was sharply pointed like nails capable of piecing your feet”.
In the rhetorical analysis of the perspective paper, I was simply explaining my writing and therefore found the overall tasks to be fairly easy and straightforward. I write that it is easy because rhetoric analysis is a style I am used to after taking a substantial number of English classes while in high school. In our rhetoric analysis, we were to describe specific elements of five rhetoric tools as used in our previous part of the assignment. I effectively tackled the requirements of the first part of the assignment by describing the same place using two distinct perspectives to give the reader separate impressions of the same place. When it came to the rhetoric analysis part, I concisely described my use of each element and the intended effect I wanted to pass on to the reader.
I found the explanation of a concept of research paper to be the most difficult of all assignments in this semester; however, I strongly feel that despite the difficulty, I delivered a thorough research paper. The most difficult part of the assignment was coming up with a topic of research that had adequate information. I had to discard other topics solely for the lack of information. I landed on my topic of research by sheer coincidence as I shopped at a video store and overheard a students’ conversation on partying that led me to decide on binge drinking as my research topic. I am grateful that information on binge drinking is extensive and easily available such that I had to be selective for the sources of my research.
My selection narrowed the topic to a specification of a study done on Northern Illinois University. While doing the literature review of my research I found it interesting that my hypothesis on binge drinking did not hold. I found out that the actual percentage of student binge drinkers is less than I supposed. I also got an insight that imaginary peer pressure is one of reasons for binge drinking among students. I feel that the narrowing down of the topic and selective use of sources for my research effectively made my research paper very thorough.
Finally, the personal narrative comes third of my best three assignments for this semester. This assignment covered of one of the most significant periods of my life. An interesting fact of the personal narrative essay assignment was its general scope as long as the topic chosen had a significant impact on a person’s life. I love the freedom that comes with general descriptions in assignment tasks. The narrative essay resented an opportunity to stand out as a skilful, thoughtful writer and effectively presented my experiences to the reader. This assignment is a highlight of my ability to set up a scenario using relevant background information and incorporate characters to develop the narrative plot. The narrative clearly showed the reader the story instead of telling the reader the story.
I conclude by noting that this semester has been awesome as a first back in school. I have rekindled my writing flame and grown my eagerness to handle big and better writing tasks. The assignments for this semester have brought out the writer personality in me by offering great instances of self-learning. I am grateful for the enjoyable opportunity of being part of this class and for your generous time.