Over semester one I believe I have developed and improved skills in my writing such as,

connecting my body paragraphs to my thesis statement and my use of analysis following textual

evidence used in my essays. Following the first big essay I wrote this year, “Is the American

Dream truly achievable?”, it became apparent that my use of textual evidence throughout my

essay lacked relating to my thesis. With the use of corrections and mark-ups done by Mr. Pace on

my essay, I was able to take into account what I needed to work on to strengthen my next essay,

which was my literary analysis essay titled, “Crimes Of The 1920’s Portrayed In The Great

Gatsby”. Overall my attempts at corrections helped to earn me a better grade on my Gatsby essay

opposed to my essay on the American Dream. I believe due to the better grade I received on my

essay, “Crimes Of The 1920’s Portrayed In The Great Gatsby”, this piece of work exemplifies

my skills in connecting my body paragraphs to my thesis statement and my use of analysis

following textual evidence used in my essays. Although I feel I have improved in some areas, I

will continue to work even harder in semester two to continue to improve and develop new skills

to make my writing even better.

I think skills I have struggled with most this past semester, even when I felt like I have

improved in some areas, is the use of analysis of textual evidence in my essays and the depth of

my introduction paragraphs including my thesis statements. In my essay, “Crimes Of The 1920’s

Portrayed In The Great Gatsby”, I tended to use the statement, “The significance of this evidence

highlights…” quite a bit. I realize from mark-ups done on my paper that it is a pretty generic

statement that I used one too many times, showing the lack of effort used when analyzing textual

evidence that relates to my thesis and main ideas. For the following essays I will try to find better

and more personal ways to connect and analyze textual evidence I use in my papers. Similar to

this, for almost all my thesis statements I feel I lack the skills on forming a solid outline for the
following parts of my essays, making it challenging to give good, efficient textual evidence and

quotes I can analyze easily. Following this knowledge of what I need to improve on, my goals

for semester two are to spend more time structuring my introduction paragraphs and finding

excellent evidence to support my thesis statements that will give me much depth in my analysis

of these quotes and evidence. I would also love to improve on my sentence structure and time

management of writing my essays and completing my work. I feel as if this past semester I

lacked proficiency in both those areas, making most of my work sloppy and unorganized. I

believe I can achieve these goals over the course of the year by putting more focus into my

research and really paying attention to the lectures in class that are structured to help improve our

writing. Not only will I focus more on research but I will spend more time writing, revising and

touching up each part of my future essays to hopefully achieve my goals for organization and

receive better grades on not only my essays, but also homework and classwork assignments as

well. I believe working on strengthening these skills will help improve my writing overall to

become neat and professional for not only semester two but my senior year and in college.