Out of my writing portfolio, a piece that I thought was a good piece of writing was my second formal essay: How Cars, Roads, and Maps Changed the Country Forever. I felt that this piece was definitely a step up from my previous formal essay. I liked the way it flowed more and felt that it stayed on topic and supported the thesis better than my previous essay. I think a major factor to why this is the case is because I enjoyed the topic more. I love cars, so being able to connect them with maps made it easy for me to write. I’ve always written better while writing about a topic I enjoy, so this wasn’t much of a surprise for me. Another factor would be the time I allowed myself to work on the essay. I tend to procrastinate and think I will have more time to do stuff than I actually do and will end up rushing to get it done. This always ends up with me not completely satisfied with my finished work. A subconscious reason why I do this is because I stress about writing it and think I will not be able to write something I like, so I push it off until it needs to be done.
What’s good about my writing is that I tend to have interesting ideas, but sometimes I struggle to write a good thesis and stay on topic throughout the essay. Those were two things I focused on while writing my second essay. I also tried to stay away from the 5 paragraph essay format in both of my formal essays which I am so used to. In my essay How Cars, Roads, and Maps Changed the Country Forever, you can see this in the thesis where I didn’t say what my 3 body paragraphs were going to be, and by the body paragraphs themselves. One thing I would still like to improve is my sentence structure and vocabulary used while writing. I feel they both can get repetitive at times. This will mainly just improve over time with more writing. I haven’t written that many essays in my career, so I feel like I have a good base right now with the potential to be way better.
One piece of writing I feel that I can improve upon is my first formal essay: A Map is More Than a Piece of Paper. While writing this essay, I procrastinated a lot and didn’t love the way it turned out. I think I had good body paragraphs in the essay that could use a little tweaking, but I want to focus more on my introduction and more specifically my thesis. I feel rewriting these could transform the essay. In my media and society class, we were in pairs working on our thesis and I realized that having a great thesis makes writing the rest of the essay much easier. Not only what to write, but it helps with the flow of the essay.
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