Sabrina Butler

Mr. Pace

C Block

June 8th, 2023

End-of-Year Reflection

Over the course of this year, I have developed my skills in researching/using quality

evidence, analysis/synthesis, and being more clear and concise. I believe that my Comparative

Analysis Essay highlights these skills. In this essay, I strategically used quotes from

Slaughterhouse-Five and “The Things They Carried” that had similarities and allowed me to

make insightful connections. I was able to write great points of comparison between the two

stories in that they used escapism to cope with mental trauma. I deeply analyzed the differences

in the way the authors portrayed psychological damage from the war; in Slaughterhouse-Five,

Billy Pilgrim was out of the war but reexperiencing his war memories through PTSD - or what

he called time travel, but in “The Things They Carried”, Lieutenant Jimmy was experiencing war

in real-time and was escaping through fond memories of his girlfriend. In this essay, I

demonstrated clear and concise writing skills. While I had several sentences of analysis and

synthesis, each sentence was valuable and not repetitive. Overall, my Comparative Analysis

Essay was definitely my best essay of the year and I feel as though I exemplified the skills I

learned this year throughout the entire essay.

Throughout this year, I have struggled with conventions, following essay organization,

and providing context when needed. I can reflect on the Literary Analysis Synthesis Essay and

the Civil Disobedience and Man vs. Society writing assignment in order to show where I have

room to improve. In my Literary Analysis Synthesis Essay, my body paragraphs were very

similar and it made for a weak essay because the different paragraphs and topics weren’t clear. In

this essay, I had quite a few awkward sentences that needed to be tweaked, thus it was one of the

essays I revised in my LAMP. Additionally, I divided my paragraphs up not according to the

required essay structure, so I was marked down for that. However, I was able to learn from these

mistakes through my revision process and I think this has helped me to learn how to write more

clearly and effectively. In my Civil Disobedience and Man vs. Society paper, I had several issues

with conventions, especially with citations and providing ample context when talking about

characters or events from a book. In writing this essay, I initially thought that if I referenced the

page number and the author before a quote, I wouldn’t have to cite it after the quote. After

receiving my essay and the corrections, I discovered that this was not true. While I lost points on

my essay, I think this was a crucial learning experience for me because I would not have known

that unless I made the mistake. Furthermore, I had issues with not adding enough context before

discussing characters from The Crucible. Fortunately, I was able to fix this and learn from my

errors through my revisions. I hope to build on my English skills in my senior year and beyond

by developing my thesis crafting skills, adding different types of evidence/sources, and making

connections to other time periods, works of literature, or units within a course. By improving my

theses, I will be able to write more insightful, interesting essays. I want to write with different

types of evidence/sources such as primary sources, statistical evidence, historical evidence, etc.

Having a greater variety of sources not only makes my essay more creative and enjoyable but

also strengthens my thesis and makes my point more convincing to the readers. Lastly, I want to

make connections between different time periods, other books, or other units within a course

because it will make my essay highly advanced and complex. By pushing myself in this way, I

will become a great writer.

Moving forward into senior year, my academic goals are to become more comfortable

and confident in voicing my opinions during class, strengthen my reading comprehension skills,

and learn how to study more effectively. I always have insightful thoughts, opinions, or questions

during my classes, but I’m often too shy to voice them. Next year I hope to get out of my

comfort zone and be more talkative in class because that is a skill I can translate to all areas of

my life, especially in the work world. I need to be confident enough to advocate for myself and
make suggestions that could improve things for others in the workspace; my coworkers,

customers, or clients. I would like to improve my reading comprehension skills in my senior year

because this is a skill that I can take with me to college and beyond. Having strong reading

comprehension skills applies to several areas in life as it will help me become more efficient in

any work that involves reading or writing. Not only will it increase efficiency, but it will also

enable me to read higher-level books, which I will be tackling in college. Lastly, I want to find

more effective ways of studying because it will help me a lot in college. This year I had to buckle

in on my academic work and find effective ways to study, however, I have yet to find study

methods that are both effective and time-efficient. In college, the courses will be more rigorous

and fast-paced, so I will need to have good study habits and methods that help me absorb (not

memorize) the information.

One thing I will remember from Junior Literature is the Symbolism Tracker/Symbolism

Paragraph and when our class watched The Great Gatsby movie. I personally loved the book The

Great Gatsby and I really enjoyed analyzing the symbolism throughout the story. As much as the

Symbolism Tracker was irritating at times, it really helped me make insightful observations of

the symbolic themes in the book and made for a great grade on the Symbolism Paragraph. I got

advanced for my evidence, analysis, and organization on the rubric, and I couldn’t have gotten

that without the Symbolism Tracker. Above all, watching The Great Gatsby movie was by far

one of my favorite activities in this class. Besides being entertaining, it was cool watching the

movie after doing so much analysis on the book. As I watched the movie, I got to see how the

movie directors envisioned the characters and the places, such as the East Egg, the West Egg and

Gatsby’s grand house, and the Valley of Ashes. It was also interesting to watch how certain

scenes in the book were depicted in the movie. I think that watching the movie version of a book

we read in class is super rewarding and entertaining. I think it’s a nice treat after all the work we

do with the book we read and study in class.