Mishra 1 Amitabh Mishra Ms.

Ingram English 1101 17 September 2013 A Whole New Level Middle school was the true beginning of the journey I would take in reading and writing. Each individual has their own way of writing and many of them find that early on. We were told that English classes would only get tougher, and as I went on, I would not be prepared for what I would encounter. These three years were the stepping stones to what high school had. High school was a whole new story. My senior year of high school was the time where I found out that English required more analyzing and research, especially for the research paper. Before beginning senior year, I was told the horrors of taking AP English Literature and Composition. I had this class second semester so I asked many of my friends how their experience was. They described it as horrible, torturous, painstaking, and killer. This did not improve my confidence at all about writing since I passed my past three English classes with average grades on papers. I had struggled to try and maintain a B average in that class. This had me thinking about switching over to the Honors level English class, but I decided to push through and use it as a learning experience. I talked to my previous teacher, Mrs. Eckstein, about what the class would be like. She said That class is more advanced than my AP class because it has a lot more reading, research, and writing.

Mishra 2 How can I try and improve my writing? I said. The best way to practice writing for that class is to just keep practicing said Mrs. Eckstein. English was one of my worst subjects, and I pretty much hated it with a passion because I felt it involved too much time consuming reading and writing which would not benefit me later on. The first week of AP English consisted of a lot of reading and a bunch of practice writing. I was not used to this and I slowly thought of it as a burden. She taught us different tips and tricks to help us write our first essay but they were confusing. Some of her tips included writing more detail and mostly why the author put that in there. I was reading books that did not really interest me. Pretty soon it was time to begin our first essay on a book that we had read. I was presented the topic and I thought I could write it on my own and I was a little over confident. I wrote my first paper thinking I had written a great paper, but apparently not. What were you doing in this essay Amitabh? said Mrs. Tuttle. I tried to write about the topic but I guess I didnt do a detailed job of it I said. The way you wrote this passage seems like you skimped over or didnt even read the passage at all she said. You need to read the passage more carefully and pick out the important phrases that would satisfy the prompt. I said I feel like that is what I have done by picking out details and mostly imagery and diction that relate to the prompt. Use those details and connect that to the author Mrs. Tuttle insisted. I decided to try this next time as we had more practice writings to do later on. We had these assignments called timed writings where we had to write an essay on a topic

Mishra 3 during a certain time period. This trick helped me because it allowed me to focus on a smaller passage and set myself a goal. I used the technique that Mrs. Tuttle told me and my grades slowly increased. Finally it was time for me to plan and draft out the research paper. Many of the essays in AP Literature included reading a book and writing about it. The final research paper was to read a book of from a list and do some research on it. This research included finding out information and professional reviews on the book and incorporating them into the paper. This is what college will have in store for you. Mrs. Tuttle said. If you can not handle the workload and manage time for this final project, you are going to struggle with the papers you write in college. We had to write a final draft, but that did not turn out so good. At the same time I had other class homework to do. However, writing that final research paper did teach me how to read certain topics from a credited source with detail and be able to pick out what I needed to write about. This was harder than I thought. What is wrong with the final draft? I said. You didnt put in enough detail from the sources into your first draft I was a little frustrated and said I put in the information from the credited sources into my paper. Mrs. Tuttle said What you need to do is take what you found in your sources and incorporate them into the paper, but not a whole lot. Once you have done that, you have to explain the reasons why the author put that there in context and support what other sources had to say.

Mishra 4 Although I did not get a second chance to rewrite my research paper I did learn something important. When reading something, read that in detail. There could be instances where the author decided to have little details be something meaningful. Also, I learned that when writing an essay on something from a book, make sure to write the purposes of why the author put that in the book and how that affects how the reader reads it.