Summative Reflection
Throughout this entire year I feel like I have grown tremendously as a writer. At the beginning of the year my strengths in my essays was my organization, and thesis statements; I was always able to have a well thought out plan, I just struggled with executing my ideas in a precise way. My weaknesses were the strength of my arguments and my conclusions. In eleventh grade I got use to not writing a conclusion paragraph and just jumping right into my points because that's what I was taught to do; I had to work really hard to move away from that type of writing and I think I've made many corrections on it. I also had weaknesses on punctuation, word choice, specificity, and plot summary. I have worked hard to fix these problems in my papers, but I still need to continue to correct them. The main improvement I saw in my writing throughout the year was how I moved away from summarizing the plots of novels and plays to actually writing about their content.
For my six artifacts I chose the essays that I felt had a strong argument with significant citations. I also chose essays that I enjoyed writing like the timed writing: The Street. For prose I chose my Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? essay, and timed writing: The Street. For poetry I used my For That He Looked Not Upon Her response and Hamlet Act lll response. Lastly for free-response I chose the Hamlet Act l response and my Hamlet final essay. The reason I chose The Street timed writing is because I really enjoyed writing this and I liked the passage. I chose to use three different Hamlet essays because out of all the plays, poems, short stories, and novels we read this year it was my favorite assignment. When making revisions to all my artifacts I definitely had patterns on the corrections I made. In every artifact I fixed my word choice and specificity because I struggled in this area of each essay. I also changed where I used "the reader" in each artifact because when you use this it takes your essay out of the work you are writing about and it doesn't move the argument forward. One other major change I made in almost every artifact was my explanation on the question being asked. I had to move away from summarizing the plot to providing a detailed answer.
This year I've had to read many different short stories, poems, plays, and novels. The three that informed my growth as a reader are The Poisonwood Bible, Hamlet, and Frankenstein. I enjoyed reading the Poisonwood Bible;mit helped me better understand the role different archetypes of characters play. Rachel was a stereotypical teenage girl and since the audience learned this early on they already had developed and opinion of her. Also the way the book is written in different sections changed the way I would read a novel like this. The narrator doesn't have to to stay the same and the different points of view makes you see the story in a different light. Hamlet was my other favorite assignment from this year. The irony and tragedy throughout the entire play was very interesting and I learned how to read Shakespeare's writing. Once I figured out how to understand Shakespeare it became much easier to read and respond to. Frankenstein was difficult for me to read, but it reinforced the idea of not judging someone and giving steryotypes just off of looks. You would think the monster would be a harmful and scary character but he turned out to be the exact opposite.
I have learned a lot in AP Language this year and I have improved on my writing and analysis of novels, poems, short stories, and plays. In the future being able to analyze what I'm reading will help me tremendously because i will really know what's going on in the work I'm studying. Before this year I had a huge struggle with being able to comprehend what i was reading, but this class helped me with that. I can take my new knowledge of better comprehension and analysis to college; I feel that it will benefit me because I will take more out of every one of my classes than just attendance. Before this year I never took anything away from assigned novels in class except a good grade and now i can actually learn something from them, like I did with Frankenstein.
For my six artifacts I chose the essays that I felt had a strong argument with significant citations. I also chose essays that I enjoyed writing like the timed writing: The Street. For prose I chose my Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? essay, and timed writing: The Street. For poetry I used my For That He Looked Not Upon Her response and Hamlet Act lll response. Lastly for free-response I chose the Hamlet Act l response and my Hamlet final essay. The reason I chose The Street timed writing is because I really enjoyed writing this and I liked the passage. I chose to use three different Hamlet essays because out of all the plays, poems, short stories, and novels we read this year it was my favorite assignment. When making revisions to all my artifacts I definitely had patterns on the corrections I made. In every artifact I fixed my word choice and specificity because I struggled in this area of each essay. I also changed where I used "the reader" in each artifact because when you use this it takes your essay out of the work you are writing about and it doesn't move the argument forward. One other major change I made in almost every artifact was my explanation on the question being asked. I had to move away from summarizing the plot to providing a detailed answer.
This year I've had to read many different short stories, poems, plays, and novels. The three that informed my growth as a reader are The Poisonwood Bible, Hamlet, and Frankenstein. I enjoyed reading the Poisonwood Bible;mit helped me better understand the role different archetypes of characters play. Rachel was a stereotypical teenage girl and since the audience learned this early on they already had developed and opinion of her. Also the way the book is written in different sections changed the way I would read a novel like this. The narrator doesn't have to to stay the same and the different points of view makes you see the story in a different light. Hamlet was my other favorite assignment from this year. The irony and tragedy throughout the entire play was very interesting and I learned how to read Shakespeare's writing. Once I figured out how to understand Shakespeare it became much easier to read and respond to. Frankenstein was difficult for me to read, but it reinforced the idea of not judging someone and giving steryotypes just off of looks. You would think the monster would be a harmful and scary character but he turned out to be the exact opposite.
I have learned a lot in AP Language this year and I have improved on my writing and analysis of novels, poems, short stories, and plays. In the future being able to analyze what I'm reading will help me tremendously because i will really know what's going on in the work I'm studying. Before this year I had a huge struggle with being able to comprehend what i was reading, but this class helped me with that. I can take my new knowledge of better comprehension and analysis to college; I feel that it will benefit me because I will take more out of every one of my classes than just attendance. Before this year I never took anything away from assigned novels in class except a good grade and now i can actually learn something from them, like I did with Frankenstein.