In the beginning of the year, a goal I set for myself was to connect with my readers. I have always struggled with that aspect of my writing. I usually write toward the reader, “you”, which sometimes takes away myself from what I am writing so I wanted to improve on that. I need to work more on appealing to my readers, pathos, and our first assignment the Literacy Narrative, gave me the perfect opportunity to work on that. My Literacy Narrative needed me to focus on a point in my life that developed my sense of literacy, language, and/or understanding of communication. So, I had to write it from my perspective instead of directing it toward the reader. By the end of the essay, I was proud of what I had written. I was successfully able to connect with my reader through use of detains and emotion in my writing. I was able to write down all that I was thinking and feeling at that moment. That was a perfect way to start the semester because it let me practice applying what I had learned about the use of pathos in my writing and develop in as I continued the year.  

The research paper, “Discovery Essay”, required be to stay neutral in a sense so as to not let my biases influence what I had found. This essay required me to do the exact opposite of what I wanted to work on. This paper allowed me to practice writing in a neutral tone even though I was working on inputting myself in my writing. This helps me to not get used to always including myself and writing without including myself so I can present my ideas in a different way, a way that is suitable for my purpose of writing. By the end of the Discovery Essay, I learned that it was not that I am not able to input myself in my writing and connect with my readers, but I just did not have the need to do so in papers I had written in the past. In high school, the papers that I included pathos in were argumentative essays and I did not base it so much on what I felt was true but what the evidence pointed toward. I usually worked backward where I found the evidence before picking a side which resulted in me not including my initial thoughts. In addition, I learned that you do not need to pick a side to appear to your audience.  

In addition, I also developed strategies for reading, drafting, collaborating, revising, and editing. In the past, I usually, first, wrote whatever was in my head, then, go back to include any evidence and revise. Though there were no clear distinctions between the different steps. Throughout this class we were required to present our ideas, then find the evidence, then the draft, and finally the revised final. Repeating this process for a lot of these papers helped me to see the benefits. When I broke the process into different parts I was able to think about what I wrote more in detail as well as improve my writing because it allowed me to take a step back and see and comprehend what I had already written before adding on.