Name of Assignment: “Capturing a Moment” Essay Draft
Subject: English
Facilitator/Teacher: Professor Andaluz
Description of Work/Assignment: Write an essay that illustrates a time in your life where you were impacted. Use language to get your reader to be immersed in your story.
Which 21st Century Skill do you feel this assignment addresses, and why?
I feel this assignment addresses civic literacy and engagement because we had to understand how to impact our reader. The main topic of our textbook is writing for a unique audience appropriately. We had to understand our audience and how they would react to our story.
What are you most proud of from this assignment, and why?
I am most proud of my sample I created to describe the location of my story. I used lots of figurative language and I believe it came out beautifully. I plan to add more figurative language to my final papers to make them more vivid.
How did you develop and/or improve upon your 21st Century Skill with this assignment?
I improved upon my communication skills with this assignment. We had to critique our fellow classmates essays and give tips on how they could improve their papers along with the guidelines. I was nervous at first because I don’t particularly enjoy telling others what to do, but I understood that feedback is important and that no paper can ever get better without peer review.
What was most difficult about completing this task?
The most difficult part about this task was the deadline. I managed to finish my essay very quickly, but we were only given a week to complete it. This isn’t necessarily a short amount of time, but dual credit classes are much faster paced than I am used to. However, I am getting used to working faster and I genuinely feel like I am working better than I ever did in highschool.
How could you improve this work? If you could start over, what would you do differently?
If I could redo this project, I would like to make my writing more vivid. My essay was very bland and didn’t have much flavor. Sure I evoked emotions, but I didn’t paint a picture. I got a really good piece of advice from my peer who told me to use more dialogue and I totally agree!
How does this relate to what you have learned in the past?
This correlates to what we had been reading in our textbook “The Writer’s Way.” Our textbook is dedicated to teaching us how to write for an audience and better understand how to impact the reader. I’ve learned lots of useful tips like “show don’t tell” and “paint a picture.” Professor Andaluz also gives us tips and reads us essays to show us what good writing sounds like.
How can you apply this to future learning?
Since I am learning how to write for a college audience, I can use these skills for every essay I write in the future. I’ve been taking lots of notes on our textbook and hope to go over the skills I have learned before I write my papers.
Photo used under Creative Commons from Rennett Stowe