Meilhac 1 Alexa Meilhac Professor Jessica Camargo English 111 5 December 2013 A Final Reflection For Expository Writing

When I first walked into my Expository Writing class, I did not expect that I would ever get the inspiration to start writing fictional stories again, and yet I did. Aside from getting my creativity flowing, I learned how to write attention grabbing introductions and riveting conclusions that would leave the audience wanting for more. It is through these events that I became the writer that I am today. My inspiration for stories would usually come to light whenever we got writing prompts, quick writes, and brainstorming activities. The first time that I had inspiration strike was when we were given a prompt entitled: College = Hope. Unfortunately, I had a terrible case of writers block due to being put on the spot. It was not until later that day that I was able to sit down and get my thoughts down into an essay-length entry into my Writers Notebook. A few days later, we were brainstorming ideas for our literacy narrative essays which required us to jot down any ideas that came to mind. For my paper, I chose to write about how my passion for writing came to be and how far I have come with my writing skills. Another time inspiration struck was when a couple weeks before the last day of class, Ms. Camargo gave us a storyboard sketch that we could use for any type of writing. So far, I have used the storyboarding technique with planning my online Portfolio. In the future, I am going to use it for planning out my stories.

Meilhac 2 During the literacy narrative, I found out that my introductions were not as well thought out and attention grabbing as I perceived. My opening paragraph looked like this in my rough draft: Like any toddler, I did learn how to read and write from various people in my life. Mostly my mother taught me, because my father was still learning English at the time since he had only moved from France to the United States a few years before I was born to marry my mom. My maternal grandmother and grandfather also helped, because my mother and father both had jobs at the time. Plus, we also lived with them since we could not afford our own house. Nothing much happened during my kindergarten years there besides finding out that I had terrible handwriting, which I still do. During that time my mother and father got a divorce and she had remarried, so I moved up here to Charlotte, North Carolina to be with her and my stepfather. It was shortly afterward that I had started at my new elementary school. When I got it back with constructive criticism from my teacher in the margins, the first couple of comments were positive and then I got to the one about my opening. It pointed to paragraph two and stated: Would you consider starting here instead? It seems to jump right into the story faster, and you could reuse some of the info from the current first paragraph later in the essay if needed. I realized that Ms. Camargo was right and that my narrative would be better if I had started closer to the action. I used her advice and, now, my narrative opening looked like this: I loathed my elementary school years with a great burning passion. This was mostly because the staff at my first school did not care about the students and their varying learning styles. Then a few years later, we moved from Charlotte to Concord, so I could attend a better school. At my second school the staff was nicer to the students and cared about learning style. The only problem was that they would not let me write my own notes, because I could not keep up with the rest of the class so the teachers or their assistants would write them for me during recess. They would hand

Meilhac 3 them to me after class hoping that I would understand what we had talked about that day. I never understood what we talked about in class, because I paid attention since I never wrote my own notes. Finally I graduated and had a break for the summer and that was when I began writing on my own. I noticed that it did make it flow better and went on to write introductions for other papers like it. Currently, I have written a chapter for a story that began in the action and the following chapter started to give the events leading up to the first chapter and I plan to use this technique with more of my stories in the future. Aside from starting with a terrible beginning, I also ended with bad conclusions. I have always had problems with writing endings for any piece of writing that I have done. For example, my narrative ended like this in my draft: My first semester went by without a hitch since it was developmental classes. During that semester for my English 095 class I wrote a paper on my writing process and I made a great grade on it! I also did a presentation on how to notice a Mary Sue and Gary Stu character that got me a one hundred! I only made a C for the class, because I had to miss my classes for personal reasons. The next semester, I did not have any English courses and continued to write in private. It was during this time that I met my boyfriend and came out of my shell with my writing. My stories became brighter and happy again due to how he made me feel; he still makes me feel this way. I also began throwing him my ideas and bits of my stories, so he could edit my work and give me comments on how he felt about it. Now, Im in my third semester at school and in another English class. Hopefully, I will continue to grow and flourish as a writer as well as a person. The comment beside it said that I should reflect and analyze; expand, elaborate, and make more claims of self. I took this to heart and revised it to look like this: All in all I believe that all of these events have had an effect on my linguistic literacy. Most of the connections with my writing have to deal with how I felt at

Meilhac 4 the time. For example, in the second paragraph, I was determined to prove that I could write by myself. I hope to grow and flourish by being more open about sharing my work with others besides the people close to me. I view writing as an outlet for my feelings or to at least project what I am feeling. I perceive learning as a way to expand my horizons and subjects to write about. From my point of view this makes a better ending. Of course, I created another bad conclusion for my persuasion speech: So, teens, as you prepare to look at your career options, keep your mind open to not just your dream job, but one as a back-up plan in case your dream career does not work out. For example, becoming or being a self-employed novelist possibly with another job on the side. Think of as many back up careers as you can just in case some do not work out. I have Video Game Design and Nursing as back-ups if writing does not work out. For now, just focus on getting some job experience and education beyond high school. When you are searching for a career in the future your education and previous work experience comes in handy with the higher up jobs. Of course, there are some exceptions to that rule, but they are innovators and entrepreneurs. Just keep in mind that you are not the only one who is searching for a job or niche in the market, and might have to get or apply for a different job while on your search. I got a comment from one of the people in my peer review group saying that in my final paragraph that I was focusing more on the negatives than the positives of becoming a writer. Now, that paragraph looks more positive than it did before: So, teens, as you prepare to look at your career options, keep in mind some other careers to have on the side when you are not publishing or receiving royalties. I have Video Game Design, Nursing, and retail as my options for on the side jobs. For now, just focus on getting some job experience and education beyond high school. This will be very important for when you enter the job force, since many companies hiring require these now. Just keep in mind that you are not the only one trying to get

Meilhac 5 a niche in the publishing world or job searching. You will have to get a job on the side while trying to get into both publishing and job markets. I did a great job with my compare and contrast ending, so I did not have to revise it in any way. For my endings in future stories, I will ask someone else to proofread it to make sure that it makes sense. In conclusion, Ms. Camargos class has helped me with writing in many ways. I have been given the inspiration to start writing again and will use brainstorming techniques to help me with ideas and organization with my stories. I have also been given tools to write better introductions and conclusions, and I will implement those within my future works. I will also be writing in my private writers notebook a lot more than I have in the past, because I have noticed in this class that it helps to reflect everything and writing ideas down as soon as they come to me. I have enjoyed this class and hope to continue learning new things that help me to achieve my goals of one day becoming a published author.