Looking back the begining of the semester after these few months of writing essays and developing good writing skills, I’ve noticed so many areas in which I have improved as a writer, even just between the first draft and final draft of the very first essay assigned in the class, entitled “Essay On Metaphors.” In reviewing the first draft of my essay, I notice that a big weakness of mine right off the bat was that I fail to address the prompt or even provide a clear thesis until about 200 words into the essay. I instead get wrapped up in providing the ‘hook’ or backstory behind my topic. Fortunately, by the final draft, I am able to recognize that a huge chunk of my introduction proves to be useless, serving no constructive purpose and I ended up removing a large portion of the introduction. Instead, providing a few short-and-sweet introductory sentences to both inform and grab the reader’s attention without boring or confusing them before I even introduce my argument. Though I did manage to recover this mistake in the very first essay assigned, getting into the meat of my essay in as few words as possible is something I continued to struggle with and I would say it has been a major weakness of mine. Though with the practice I was able to get through practicing essay writing throughout the semester as well as reading Kinkinborg’s advise just recently, I feel much more equipped to be successful in this area of essay writing and learning to revise in a way that ensures every word used, serves a specific purpose.
