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Sarah Bittinger
Mr. Harrell
English Composition 1
6 December, 2013
How I Did It
In middle school, we learned specific ways to write essays. We learned that each essay
we write should have three body paragraphs, an introductory paragraph, and a concluding
paragraph with each paragraph having five sentences. Again in freshman year, my English
teacher taught us a formula that we should use for the OGTs and for any other essays for his
class or in other high school classes. Last year, my sophomore year, we were taught two more
ways to write an essay, but they still had exact formulas. This year in English Composition 1, we
were told to forget all of the formulas and to develop our own voice and to use that when writing.
In English Composition 1 we wrote three major essays: the personal, the analytical, and
the profile. The titles of those essays were “Two Houses,” “A Change in Identity,” and “The
Philippines to America.” The first essay was a personal essay about my parents’ divorce and how
it affected my life. The second essay was an analytical essay about the book The Unlikely
Disciple: A Sinner’s Semester at America’s Holiest University by Kevin Roose and how it could
be applied to life. The third essay was a profile essay about my best friend Shira and her move
from the Philippines to America. Different elements in each of my essays exemplify all of the
topics we have covered in class or in our reading such as: thinking critically, analyzing, steps to
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the writing process, audience, voice, tone, etc. Ultimately, I have learned these skills and
concepts in English Composition 1, and here is the evidence.
One of the topics we learned while reading Writing without Formulas was about writing
processes. For all of my essays, I used the same writing process which is as follows. First, I
gather ideas in my head and brainstorm ideas of what to write about. Once I have an idea, I begin
to compose a rough draft. When I get about halfway through the draft, I ask someone to read it
and give me feedback. I then use that feedback to go back and change things and then continue
writing the draft until I get to the minimum amount of pages the assignment needs to be. I then
print out my essay and ask someone to help me revise it. I fix the things that need to be fixed,
proofread for any small mistakes like misspellings or punctuation, add additional sentences, and
then I turn in my finished paper. I use the feedback that I am given after it is read once more,
revise, and then turn it back in for a final grade. Using these steps helped me while writing each
of my essays.
The first time I wrote my personal essay, I made many errors and didn’t quite understand
how to bring my reader into the story and make them feel as if they were experiencing it. I wrote
my essay with no feeling. In revisions, I added more dialogue and how I felt as a response to it.
For example, in revisions, I changed, “Considering my age of four, I did not know why, but
about a month later, my dad introduced me and my brother to a woman named Sarah” to, “In a
couple minutes, I am going to meet her for the first time. Daddy says that she is his friend and
she wants to meet me and my brother. We get to the Fun Run in Downtown Akron and I see her
get out of the car.” Instead of telling how the memory was, I told it in present tense, as if it were
happening now.
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When I began writing my analytical essay, I wasn’t sure on how to approach it. I asked
many questions and was often confused with what to write about. My thesis in this essay was,
“Ultimately, Kevin Roose changed a lot in this book. He changed his personality; he learned a lot
about the people there and about the stereotypes, his perspective changed, his idea about
evangelical Christians changed, and most of all, he changed who he was as a person.” In this
essay, I used a lot of in text citations—another topic we learned in class and in the reading.
Finding quotes from the book wasn’t a simple task, but it definitely helped lengthen the essay
and provide evidence to back up what I was talking about.
Part of the reason why the analytical essay was so difficult for me is because I have never
done something like it before. I have summarized books in a book report, and I have related text
to real life, but I have never had to read something, and then analyze it and write a five page
paper telling why people should care about the subject. This essay forced me to get a new
perspective on the book and think about it in a way that wasn’t just reading and understanding
the plot of the book.
The last essay I wrote was the profile essay. I had so much fun with this essay. I was
already interested in my best friend’s moving to America, and then I got the opportunity to really
get insight about what it was like. The only hard part about it was trying to write it in a way that
wasn’t so much of me telling the story but having Shira’s voice come out in it too. For example,
when writing the beginning of my paper, I wasn’t sure how to introduce Shira using things that
she had said in our interview and without me just simply telling her story. “She assumed that she
would see snow for the first time, big houses, a lot of people with blonde hair and blue eyes, and
hear people speaking words that sounded nothing but a cluster of gibberish in her head.” This is
an example of a sentence in my essay that would work better as a quote, rather than me saying it.
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After the first couple paragraphs, I began to use more quotes which let Shira tell the story instead
of me.
Because Shira is one of my close friends, it was fairly easy to interview and write about
her. I already knew some of the things that I put in my essay, and when I needed to know
something, I could easily text her and ask my question. When I was finished with my first draft, I
printed it out and asked her to read it and help me fix things that weren’t exactly right. After
doing that, I asked my English teacher from sophomore year to help me revise it. Because she
was an English teacher, she helped a lot and gave me more ideas about what to include in the
essay.
I took English Composition for a variety of reasons. I wanted to get college credit, I
thought this would be a good class to take for post-secondary, and I wanted to improve my
writing skills. This class not only did those things, but it also will help me in my high school
classes when I am told to write an essay, and any other time after high school I need to write an
essay. I will use all of the topics we have covered in class such as voice, analyzing text, thinking
critically, using in text citations, audience, and more.