This assignment was really hard for me. I have never liked reading things I have written, in any context. I am so nitpicky that the process of reviewing my own work is actually kind of painful. Because of this, I often opt to just leave my first draft unread. This is something I have been trying to work on this semester. Gathering the courage and the determination to critique myself kindly and productively has never been easy. I always either freak myself out with all the possibilities of things I could have done differently or shut down at the simplicity of what I have already written. While working on this assignment I tried to focus on what I have done well and improved on this semester, while also taking stock of what may need more attention in the future. 

I always find myself writing better when I am speaking about my own experience. If I can connect something to my childhood or another part of my life, my writing always improves. I saw this to be a pattern throughout my work. If I could draw a personal connection, I always would. In the future I want to become confident enough in my writing that I don’t always feel the need to fall back on the safety of my own life experiences. This is really apparent in my essay, which began as a reflection of my own thoughts and biases as a child and through revision was able to be shifted to a work much more about the piece of media itself. I think there is a place for personal writing and a place for analytical writing and one should not always overtake the other, so I worked to improve this balance as much as I could over the semester, even though it was out of my comfort zone. 

One thing I am proud of is my ability to use language to describe sensory experiences. I think this is exemplified in some of my reflective writings, specifically when I talk about the Allentown fair. I really enjoy using sensory words to describe things that I saw first hand. I want to start incorporating more of these sensory terms in some of my analytical writing. I think this would help me connect to my analytical writings in the way I have been struggling to, without downright turning them to be about my own experiences. 

Upon rereading my writing portfolio, one thing I was really disappointed in myself about was the struggle I had had with the creative writing assignment. I love songs and poetry, but for some reason writing my own feels very overwhelming and impossible. If I could rewrite anything I would retry this assignment with some of the skills I have picked up in some of my other classes about how to do performative writing. I would love to have written either a song or story with more subsistence, but the idea of doing so at that time of the semester was very scary. I regret that and would love the opportunity to expand more on the poetry I did create. 

Another thing I struggled with throughout the semester was being able to narrow down my ideas. My brain moves really fast when I am writing so I often introduce many ideas in small pieces of writing. This can even be seen in this assignment. I have been working on this and trying to work on my ability to have more analysis and less claims. A time this was a really big issue was in the first draft of my essay on Aladdin. Every paragraph introduced an idea which could be its own entire essay. With help from Carlee and my peer reviewers, I was able to narrow it down to some more specific ideas, but this was still really hard for me. I often find myself doing this in reflections on readings as well. One thing which helped me with this was the 10-1 we did on The Thief of Baghdad.  This assignment was very helpful in giving me a way to express but also specify my many ideas about a piece of media. I plan to use this method more in the future when starting pieces of writing. 

This course has highlighted a lot of my writing strong suits, but also made me aware of some places where I can find improvement.