Life is full of lesson-learned experiences. Life is always going to be a never-ending learning experience. During your lifetime, you are going to experience an event that will teach you something important and ultimately shape or greatly affect your relationship to learning, reading, and writing. Throughout my lifetime, I have had too many trials and tribulations that caused me to be mentally challenged. In my opinion, everyone can relate to a life-changing experience that affected them in a righteous way. Many people teach us through positive experiences, and our enemies teach us with negative experiences. For this purpose, I owe one of my most defining experiences to my enemy, who was myself. This experience reflects my final year of high school. I was discouraging myself on how I was not going to be able to complete my end-of-the-year project. As an 18-year-old finishing my senior year of high school, I was consumed by a false sense of believing that writing an essay was the most difficult task that could not be completed satisfactorily. I failed to realize I was stressing myself out and making things harder than they really are. I am still guilty of believing that because writing is not my best strength.
Before I graduated high school, all the seniors had an end-of-the-year project. Every year, the seniors would have a six-page essay on a topic that the student could choose and present a PowerPoint presentation to go along with their essays. The purpose of the PowerPoint presentation was to expound upon your essay, including the introduction, thesis statement, three body paragraphs on the points in your thesis, conclusion, etc. I honestly thought that this was going to be a relatively easy project. Well, I was completely incorrect. My 12th-grade English teacher changed everything differently by the time my senior year came around. We had to write an essay on the book we were currently reading at the time. It was very difficult for me because I am not good at writing essays. We had to get a good comprehension of the book and expound upon the three topics my teacher provided for the project. The name of the book was ‘Macbeth’, which is a very popular story. I had to choose one of the three topics, which were evil, supernatural, and manhood. Then, we had a series of questions we had to answer within the topics we choose throughout our essay. I choose the topic of the supernatural. Based upon the learning outcomes, in my end-of-the-year project, I had to develop and logically organize appropriate details and evidence to support writing focus, making connections between ideas.
Throughout my school experience, writing an essay or research paper was always a struggle for me. I absolutely loved to read because I could remember anything I read. I did not enjoy writing because what I wrote was unorganized and I was not covering the whole idea or tasks of the assignment. I had no confidence and thought I was never going to achieve my goals in my English class. So, I let my negative thoughts take over me, and with that, I decided not to get the proper help I needed. I would get assistance in class from my teacher, but I was not trying to put forth the effort to sign up for any writing workshops to help me improve my writing. I felt that I was intelligent, and did not need any extra help. In my English class, I learned a great deal and realized that it was my level of confidence that was affecting me negatively. Then, starting this class, a couple of months later, and going through all the criteria, it was interesting to see how wrong I have been writing in the past and that there are easy outlines that can help with organizing a paper. The writing process is there to help guide you along so the writing will flow easier throughout the essay. With an abundance of hard work, reading essays and novels, going through the online articles provided, and the help of my teacher and classmates, I have gained the self-assurance I needed to write exceptionally well and understand the writing process.
Throughout my years of schooling, I have become ambivalent about writing. I have struggled in school to make myself enjoy writing. I only enjoyed writing if it was freestyle writing. I did not really enjoy writing if I had to read and find sources of evidence. I didn’t mind reading as much if it was in my interest. It has differed throughout the years I have been in school. Some years I have enjoyed writing, and other years I have not liked to write. Getting myself to enjoy writing has been quite an adventure. In elementary school, I loved to read. Writing was not a big deal either since we did not have to write so many essays. I began learning how to write when I was taught how to write my name at the age of three. Reading had just been freshly introduced, considering the fact that I wasn’t even in grade school. My parents and grandparents would always read to me, and I wanted to read those books as well. Throughout my years of reading until today, I have always loved to read books, but I just did not like writing essays if I had found different sources and organized an essay. I did not have a favorite novel, but I would just about read any book, whether it was fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, etc. Although I liked to read, I did struggle with reading comprehension, which made me dislike writing as well. I hated having to read and then go and write about it. To this day, I still do not like reading comprehension, but my feelings toward reading and writing have changed. My love for reading slowly went down the drain the older I got. I absolutely hated to read if I had to write an essay about the information.
To help me become more successful in completing my essay were the five ways to improve my essay writing skills. The first step is to make an outline. I needed to know what I was going to write about before I started writing. Before I even start writing an essay, it was very important to know what I want to talk about. In this case, I wanted to talk about all the supernatural events that occurred in ‘Macbeth’. The easiest way to narrow down a thesis statement and create an argument is to make an outline before I began to write my essay. The basic structure of my essay included the following elements: an introduction that includes my thesis statement, the body of the essay, which should include separate paragraphs discussing evidence that supports the thesis, and a conclusion that ties everything together and connects it to the thesis statement. The second step is to acquire an understanding of basic grammar, style, and punctuation. Grammar, style, and punctuation were and still are incredibly important because I wanted my research essay to be understood. Before I began to write my essay, I made sure I had an understanding of basic grammar. The basics of grammar included verb and subject agreement, proper article and pronoun usage, and well-formed sentence structures. I was positively sure I knew the proper uses for the most common forms of punctuation. Finally, while writing an essay, voice is important. I also avoided transition words that do not add anything to the sentence and unnecessary wordiness that interrupts the whole main idea from my research and evidence. The third step is using the right vocabulary and diction. It was important to know the correct definition of the words When writing my essay, I remembered I was trying to persuade others that you are an expert who can make an intelligent argument. Using big words just to sound smart often results in the opposite effect; it is easy to detect when someone is overcompensating in their writing. If I was unsure of the exact meaning of a word, I would use a dictionary rather than risk using the word incorrectly. Using obscure language could have also taken away from the clarity of my evidence. I took into consideration these facts before I pulled out the thesaurus or any other tool that was involved to change that perfectly good word to something completely different. The fourth step is to understand the argument and critically analyze the evidence. In the process of writing the essay, I always had the struggle with organizing the essay and staying on the topic of discussion. While it might be tempting to go off on a tangent about some interesting side note to your topic, I tried not to because I wanted my writing to be less concise. While completing the essay, I always question any evidence I included in my essay. I asked myself: ‘Does this directly support my thesis?’. If the answer was ‘no’, then I would exclude that evidence, or I would revise it to make it directly support my thesis statement. When I was evaluating the evidence, I was being critical and thorough. I wanted to use the strongest research to back up my thesis statement. Everything I included, I made sure it had a clear connection to my topic and the argument. The fifth and final step is knowing how to write a proper conclusion that supports your research. My conclusion is the paragraph that ties all my research together to prove my thesis.
In conclusion, the task to complete my project was to develop and logically organize the appropriate details and evidence to support writing focus, as well as to make connections between ideas. I may have struggled to complete the project, but I made sure I utilized the main five steps to enhance writing an essay. The most important thing to remember is that there is always room for growth. To be a successful person, I will never go through life. It is a must that I grow through life. I am beyond thankful for the hard times because they only made me stronger. I struggled with my senior project, but I worked very hard to the best of my ability. Every struggle that I have encountered in life has shaped me into the person I am today. My senior project was my experience that taught me something important and ultimately shape and greatly affected my relationship writing.