“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” —Ernest Hemingway
Looking back on this year, I can agree with Hemingway's quote above. I feel like even thought I've learned plenty of things, I still am kilometers away from becoming a writing master. Although I could be discouraged by how far I still have to go, I choose to be positive and focus on how far I've come. With that goal in mind, I look back and reflect on this past year of writing.
When I first started Writing 13, I thought I knew it all. I had written papers and projects for a bunch of different classes over the years. It was only after I submitted my first narrative essay in Mr. Al Naimi's class that I found out how wrong I was. My essay came back stained with so many red marks I was tempted to call an ambulance. Thankfully, his comments were encouraging and instead of causing me to give up, he motivated me to get back to my writing and improve the essay.
One of the first areas I had to improve was my structure. It took me awhile to see it, but by using peer review as a sort of mirror, I found that I was including a lot of extra pieces in my writing that were unnecessary and confusing to readers. Mr. Al Naimi helped me to see that I needed to figure out the main focus of my writing piece and make sure all the pieces (sentences,paragraphs, etc.) revolved around that main idea. He was fond of having me read my essay out loud and then having me explain how each paragraph added to the main idea. If I couldn't defend a paragraph he seemed to take great delight in yelling "Cut It!" and making scissor-like gestures with his fingers.
Once I had improved in the area of structure, I started focusing more on character development in my narrative essay, including use of dialogue to show who a character really is. I realized that if I show who someone is through their speech, it's much more interesting to readers than just telling them what the person is like. I'm looking forward to practicing this further on other narrative pieces in the future.
I also improved over the course of the year in writing non-fiction expository pieces. Providing evidence to support my positions and ideas was an area that I especially improved in. At the beginning of the year I didn't really ever support my opinions and main ideas with much evidence. However, once again Mr. Al Naimi helped convince me that this is important. He compared it to a lawyer arguing a court case without any evidence to support the fact that his accused client was innocent. I learned how to find strong sources of evidence and how to identify what was a weak piece of evidence.
In conclusion, it's clear to me that I've improved greatly as a writer over the course of the year. By working on the different areas of my writing mentioned above, I was gradually able to move myself a few steps closer to becoming a writing master.