Reflection of my Essays

The Alchemist

My Alchemist Essay demonstrates well enough in ideas and content. Most importantly, my writing makes sense and has great examples (quotation, context) that explain the main questions in the essay. In my own point of view, I think that I had a quite well and clearly written topic sentence and I appear to know the topic well. I also included some of interesting and relevant details but because I didn’t make sure to explain them well, it wasn’t that effective to the reader. Last but not least, my lacking part of ideas and content was explaining the quotations relate to the main idea of the paragraph. I didn’t show my full understanding of the quotation and therefore, I think I should focus on this instead of others.

My Alchemist Essay demonstrates organization in a variety ways. First of all, I usually begin the paragraphs with an interesting hook to grab my reader’s attention. I created a void in the paragraphs which means that I left some interrogation behind. However, it seems it wasn’t clear enough that the reader could extract the meaning behind the contents. I think that the thesis statement is acceptable but lack of stability meaning that I tried to make it as interesting as possible and made small mistakes. One thing I did well on is starting off in my body paragraphs. I began with clear topic sentence in my body paragraphs. I didn’t do well on introducing a quotation. I explained them but not thorough enough. Again, I did well on closing the paragraphs with transition sentences. At the end of the essay, I lost track of my main topic and didn’t really narrowed the topic of essay.


Julius Caesar

My Julius Caesar demonstrates well enough in ideas and content. Most importantly, my writing makes sense and has great examples (quotation, context) that explain the main questions in the essay. In my own point of view, I think that I had acceptable topic sentence and I appear to know the topic well. I also included some of interesting and relevant details but because I wrote them with words from the dictionary, I think it has made some misunderstanding to the interesting facts . Last but not least, my lacking part of ideas and content was explaining the quotations relate to the main idea of the paragraph. Although I explained how my quotations relate to the main idea of the paragraph, I believe it wasn’t that clear to the reader because I wrote it based on my point of view which means that it can be inexplicit.

My Julius Caesar Essay demonstrates organization but not well enough to impress the readers. First of all, I usually begin the paragraphs with an interesting hook to grab my reader’s attention with strong vocabulary. I think thesis statement of introduction is explicitly written. I also did well on starting off in my body paragraphs with clear topic sentences. I didn’t do well on introducing a quotation. I explained them but not thorough enough. I did well on closing the paragraphs with transition sentences. However, all two of transition sentences are written in a same structure, so it was not creative as it could be. As I get to the end, I lost track of staying with the topic and I wrote my perception of how astute Antony was.


Personal Growth

In my opinion I saw a improvement over my essay, however because we got a second chance to rewrite the essay, I got better grade on the Alchemist essay than Julius Caesar essay. In term of writing skills and structures I got vast changes because I used my Toefl idioms as well as strong vocabularies. I also found out that I need to seek for help if I’m not clear with my choice such as choosing the quotation, I think I used my time wisely on asking those questions. However, because I’m still learning English as a second language, I need some more practice on explaining quotes with appropriate vocabularies.


SLR

The SLR I chose for my essays was reason critically because I had to give evidence for every statements I made. Another reason is because these essays were mainly focusing on analyzing one person’s life and one’s acts.