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Lily Su
Ms. Michko
AP Lang-E
6/5/24
Course Reflection
As a sophomore, when recommendations rolled around I was ready to put myself in the
most rigorous courses which would reflect well on my transcript. But it was a harsh push to
reality when Mr.Sturma sugarcoated the message that my writing is awful. He told me if I want
to stay on the course of honors and AP humanities that my writing would need a lot of work in
order to succeed. It really felt like a moment of defeat. I felt really embarrassed honestly. But
after thinking about it, I realized I knew he was right and I wanted to challenge myself to be
better.
Immediately after the first couple weeks of this course, I realized that all I had to do was
learn how to write. The writing process was teachable. It felt like a whole new world; the most
important thing that I learned early on in the year stemmed from the verb list. Specifically my
rhetorical analysis writing which was the main kind of writing I had been previously failing at
became better extremely quickly. My problem was that I wasn't making any claims essentially.
The verb sheet helped me address this problem. Making claims which included specific verbiage
was very new to me but strengthened my writing by a mile. What I did know how to do was
analyze text, which I had prior knowledge to. But this course helped me build on that knowledge.
Some of the main points which strengthened my analysis was not just restating what quotes were
saying but writing about what I thought the text was suggesting and implying which allowed me
to be an individual writer by incorporating my own ideas. Because of these lessons, my
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rhetorical analysis writing(Q2) I would say is now my best genre of writing which is extremely
helpful for all future classes, not just literature based classes. My work is exemplified by my
heck week Q2 piece about Benjamin Banneker. I went into heck week feeling less pressure than
usual knowing that only one of these grades would go into the gradebook. The first day me and
my friends all said we would go easy on ourselves for the Q2, all agreeing it doesn’t matter that
much and don’t have to try that hard. But the words seemed to flow throughout my writing. The
writing was more nuanced than I had anticipated, one of my claims being connected to
Jefferson's promises to God and how allowing slavery was a disservice to a Christian. After the
writing, me and my friends compared what we wrote about and no one had written about that,
but yet I was happily surprised when I got my writing back and I got a five on that writing. I
realized that it made my writing better and in depth that I could come up with such unique
claims.
However, there are still areas which I need to improve on. In my synthesis and argument
writing I need to work on not just stating the evidence but connecting it back to the claim. In a
lot of my writing which ws synthesis and argumentative, your main comments were to
summarize the evidence better to leave room to add to my analysis. This is exemplified by my
technology Q1, which I recently revised. Rereading that piece I had thought my ideas were solid,
but I completely agreed with the fact that I lacked a connection to my thesis explicitly. I think I
thought it felt awkward connecting it back to my thesis initially, but after I worked on it I
realized it made my writing more succinct and my entire essay was more fluent. Next year, I
hope to work on the fluency of my writing and the stylistic aspects. I think a lot of my writing
can be choppy sometimes and I think the beauty of literature is how it can make a person feel;
they are in the flow of the piece, which is why I want to get better at this.
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For the rest of my time at NHS, I want to maintain a well respected resume, because I
hope to go to a more rigorous college. These writing skills will help with that in my college
essay, which will be written soon. I think I can incorporate a bigger message within a narrative
which will make my writing more meaningful. One thing I think I will remember for the rest of
highschool is the precis sheet, especially in the beginning of the year for rhetorical analysis timed
writes, my precis outline (pink sheet) was my entire guidance for my intro paragraph and I really
leaned on it throughout the year.
I think from this course I can check off the I can statements related to literacy across
discipline, problem solving from prepared for life after graduation, and all the ideas from
creative, collaborative, problem solver.
