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Due to my experiences in high school I believe that I have a strong ability to write quickly and fully. I took several writing classes with a teacher who had her doctorate. Due to this her course level was very high and our assignments were college course based. We did a lot of timed essays that required research, allowing me to learn how to quickly come up with an essay.

Having gone to a small school, I had mostly small classes. Perhaps due to this we never had any word limits on our essays. I found this to be a real struggle yesterday and had to cut a lot of my thoughts out to keep my word count down. I do ramble on, and I need to work on that. I have always been encouraged to expand, and I am not very competent at keeping my work concise.

For this research paper I picked a topic that was very recent which made it hard to find academic articles about it. In general there were very few academic articles about female politicians, and even fewer about their treatment. Instead of having several books, websites, journals, articles, as I normally would, all I had were opinion pieces. I did my best to use what resources I had, but I’m afraid they weren’t all scholarly and that might reflect badly upon my paper. I also had an original goal to compare a female and male politician, but with all the current news, it was hard to find any material relating to the election. The most difficult part for me was to find a balanced way of bringing up this topic. I didn’t want my own political views to enter (I didn’t want to pick a winner), as I don’t want my personal preference to sway how people view my paper. I want people to see that Hillary Clinton did have to deal with things that male politicians don’t and I didn’t want people to think I just wanted her to win so I will throw anything out there. In the end I didn’t end up having anything in my paper about Donald Trump as I couldn’t find a good comparison of the treatment. Since the election there has been such a large amount of news articles it was very hard to sort through them, and I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for. I really hope my paper still communicates what I hoped it would. I am very proud of my thesis statement for this paper. I also feel both my opening line and my conclusion have a very powerful feel. Though I am also confident in my entire paper, I feel like a rarely have good, strong openers/closers. My one grammatical fear for this paper is my dependent clauses. As I had an editor reading she noted that I had one paragraph that was almost entirely made up of sentences that start with dependent clauses. I tried to reword them, but it wasn’t having as powerful of a statement. I got rid of some of them and reworked some others, but now I am worried that there are still too many throughout my paper.

When my paper was edited by peers, they warned me that my essay organization was strange. At the time I did not fix it, as I was determined to do something different than the standard hamburger model. Now after reading my feedback I see the organization should have been fixed to earn a better grade. It might have been my placement of the painting, as it was at the very top, in the midst of my writing. I did this so the reader could quickly glance over and see to what I was referring. I also added headings, partly for me to be able to organize, but also because I was playing on the fact that it was a visual paper, and I thought having the words there would make the arguments jump out more. Truly this assignment was more difficult than I thought, but I also think I made it more difficult than it should have been. It took me ages to even figure out where to begin. I couldn’t think of an argument, and I in turn made one up, because I thought for some reason that was what I was supposed to do. I’m not sure why I couldn’t wrap my head around the purpose of the assignment, but it made me repeat claims and come up with confusing paragraphs. I am not very proud of my argument, but on the other side, I am proud of my analyzing skills. My art has never been good, my family are all artist and I was the one left out, however I thought this would give me an edge on this paper, as I can look at and appreciate art. I think I got lost in describing it, and completely left the purpose of the paper behind. I thought if I had enough description my lack of direction and understanding would be overlooked. I am frustrated with myself and fully plan to rework this paper- which I am worried will be difficult because I get really attached to my sentences for some reason. This time I will be more on top of my paper, and I plan to set up a meeting to discuss the direction of my work.

Out of the 4 text choices, I chose It Gets Better, and Action Makes It Better because the topics were something I am passionate about. I knew the subject matter would be easy to understand and agree with, making it easier for me to focus on my analysis of the rhetoric. I focused on the shared effort to empower people to become active. It was a common theme among the two articles, and was the main argument. I stuck to my thesis throughout my paper, but as I was preparing, and organizing before I began to write, I reworked the thesis a little. I went through the articles several times before I wrote my paper. The first time just to read it and figure out my argument. Then once I had an idea, I started a framework of my paper. I made bullets for each paragraph as I was rereading the articles. I found quotes and examples and wrote those down on my plan. I always have my mom read my papers because she was raised by two english teachers and is very good at editing, fixing my perspective and catching any grammar mistakes. She is very tough and I always feel more confident in my writing after she and I have worked through it. I do tend to be a little stubborn when it comes to other people editing my papers. I know what I am trying to come across, and if someone tries to change how my sentence is worked, or change one of my points, I feel like they aren’t understanding how I want the paper to come across.

As I began this assignment I knew that the word count would be my most difficult adversary. I tend to use flowery, difficult words, and too many sentences to explain my thoughts. Getting a 5 page article into a 300 word summary was going to be difficult. To start I knew I wanted a strong thesis and to end my paper well. That meant I would have to be very concise with my arguments. I did my best to explain my thoughts in one sentence instead of using 2 or 3. Normally I spend too much time looking up synonyms in order to enhance my paper. For this paper I tried to use strong words, but ones that needed less explanation. I also did my best to keep my sentence structures simple. The hardest part for me was to come up with my thesis. It still could use a little work, I cheated a little with it, and it isn’t the easiest sentence to understand. That is certainly something I am still working on.