Hope O’Malley

Junior ELA

Mr. Smith

8 June 2023

End of Junior Year Writing Reflection

Over the course of the academic year I feel that I have become a drastically different

writer as compared to the end of my sophomore year. Throughout the units we have covered in

Junior English Literature and Composition I have learned several valuable skills and have been

pushed to incorporate newer strategies into my writing that I may never have used without this

guidance. A skill I have developed more this year has been my ability to choose appropriate

evidence as well as setup smooth transitions to integrate them into my writing. Before this year

this skill had been very difficult for me as I sometimes have issues with choosing quotes, or other

evidence, that was an appropriate length for my writing piece. I also had a lot of trouble making

sure that my transitions were smooth in order to avoid any choppiness throughout my essays.

Something I feel that I have improved on this year would be my thesis structure. I have definitely

learned to become much more thoughtful in the research stage of my writing process which has

subsequently helped me create much stronger arguments in my writing. I think this improvement

is especially prominent in the assignment that tasked me with comparing the essay Civil

Disobedience, by Henry David Thoreau, and The Crucible, by Arthur Miller. I was confident in

my thesis because during the planning phase I used newer strategies to improve my planning and

I was very thorough in the explanation of my argument. Doing this definitely gave me a much

clearer image of what my thesis was arguing, which made building my introductory paragraph
and collecting relevant evidence much easier. An area that I feel I still need to improve on is the

analysis portion of my writings. I know that my analytical skills have definitely improved, but I

still feel that it's a weak spot in my writing. Looking back on my graphic organizers I can see that

my analysis portions were less detailed than they should have been and could have been

expanded much more to fully support my thesis. In my literary analysis of The Great Gatsby it's

clear that my evidence is very solid, but my analysis does not fully explain why I chose the

quotes I picked and how they contributed to my overarching idea. I think adding more about my

thought process in selecting the specific quotes as well as dissecting the themes within them

would have made my analysis much stronger. Overall I think my analysis skills have become

much more refined this year but it's still an area that I feel needs the most improvement. Going

forward I hope that I may improve upon my entire writing process, but especially focus on my

areas of weakness to make sure I don't have any holes in my essays. Especially with college

applications due in the near future I want to make sure that my writing is elevated enough to

portray the best version of myself and my abilities. Beyond senior year I would like to keep

improving my writing skills as I'm sure that they will be necessary in college, and beyond, and

because I have recently learned to enjoy the process of writing more. Moving into my senior year

I hope to continue to do well academically in my classes and push myself to learn about areas of

study I may have an interest in in the future. I also want to continue to work on myself to make

sure that I am fully prepared for life after high school. The skills that I’ve taken from Junior

Literature and Composition have not only helped me complete writing assignments in other

classes, such as my HARE project in history, but they will be important as I write my college

applications in the near future. From this class I will definitely take away the analysis of The
Great Gatsby not only because it was a very thorough unit in our class, but also because it was

eye opening to see how small details in writing can be connected to major ideas and themes.