Mustakim Choudhury

6/5/19
2nd Hour

Letter of Reflection

During this year of my writing career, I made a lot of progress in improving my writing

skills. I remember my very first essay and how choppy the structure was. But, throughout the

course of my ELA class I learned so many techniques to improve my essay’s quality that my

final draft of my first essay is drastically different. My paragraphs are more organized and my

ideas are clearly laid out. I realized that I could support my argument in many other ways other

than just giving my opinion. As, I compared my first draft and my revised draft, I realized the

amount of improvement I made. However, I still need a lot more work on perfecting my essays. I

feel like this is just a small area of growth and I need to learn more about writing in different

formats.

In my portfolio, the essay that I feel most proud about is the argument essay titled

Benefits of Reparations. I wrote this piece using motivation from Ta- Nehisi Coates’ article “The

Case for Reparations.” I really enjoyed how our class worked together to decipher the meaning

behind the text. This gave me a chance to study the patterns and rhetorical strategies Coates used

to write his piece. I learned a lot from reading his article and this helped me make my best essay.

During my ELA course, I learned about the importance of a thesis and how it could affect the

reader. Also, I learned about how you can provide a counter argument in your writing to show

the reader that you understand both sides of the situation. All of the strategies I learned helped

me clearly explain my essay and it showed how credible I was as a writer.

 Even though I did improve a lot during this course, I still have even more room for

improvement. I noticed while writing the final drafts of the analysis essay and the book review

that I was not able to really improve these essays. I couldn't improved these essays because I’m

not very familiar with the essay types. I didn’t really know what had to really go into a book

review other than just giving my opinion. For the analysis essay, I wasn’t entirely sure how to

structure the details. My argument essays should be a lot more better than any other essay in the

portfolio. This is because I had the most practice doing argument essays. There is a good and a

bad side to my writing and hopefully my downsides get covered up by the success in my

argument essays.

Throughout my writing career this year, I learned a lot to improve my overall writing

standards. I improved my paragraph structure by using a thesis statement as an outline. I was

able to rhetorically analyze a professional piece and use it in my very own essay to support my

arguments. I realized how much I improved through editing my rough drafts and seeing the

crucial amounts of detail and organization missing. With all this I thought there was not much

more to writing professionally, but I got a long way to go because I need work in being

comfortable to write many types of essays and not just argument essays. My portfolio should

indicate the difference between my best work which is my argument essays and my least

effective writing, the book review. This portfolio can represent the position I am in right now and

show how far I’ve come as a writer.