Essay 1 reflection

I will be reflecting on the process of writing and revising my first college essay. The idea of this first essay was to write about my writing life. This was an extremely hard idea for me to wrap my head around at first. All I could think about was high school writing experiences and grades. The thinking behind my writing life was very exterior and recent as I was brainstorming. Then I reached back deep into my mind to think about my first writing experiences and my grandmother popped into my head. I started thinking about the influence she had on me as small child and teenager and how her influence indirectly impacted my writing life.

At the beginning of the semester when I first turned this essay in, I felt like I did a pretty good job. I received an A- on the paper while shedding some light on how grateful I am to have my grandmother in my life. Other than correcting a few small grammatical issues I felt like my paper was in pretty good shape.

Looking back at my first paper I see that I can make a few good changes to boost my paper up to that A or A+ range. My conclusion was a bit elementary as Professor Mary had explained to me. After really looking at how developed the rest of my paper was, I can see how my conclusion did not keep up with the rest of my paper. I did some research on good conclusion paragraphs and discovered that a good conclusion answers the question “so what?” I realized that I should be giving readers an important idea to remember in my conclusion. I also realized that I should review my main points but not in a repetitious fashion. To revise my paper I mainly focused on editing my conclusion. My goal was to make my conclusion more engaging and I believe I accomplished this in my substantial revision. My conclusion definitely now answers that “so what” question. After substantial revisions, my conclusion is now like the pretty bow that is finally placed on a present after you are done wrapping it.

Here is the video I used to research about conclusions: