# data[].attributes.body
For my autoethnographic essay, I took what I learned from the second essay and I outlined the question I would answer and laid out a chronological list of events in my life I wanted to talk about. I also tried to tie it together in the outline, so I knew what final direction my essay would be going in before I even started my first draft. This process was extremely helpful.

# data[].attributes.body
As I look back on this essay, I can see my struggle to get back into the flow of academic writing. My first draft is well under the word count, with very little structure. I took the approach of thinking about the plot chronologically and inserting analysis along the way. In this process, I hoped to reach a conclusion that I could back to and make a claim from. I believe this strategy did serve the purpose I wanted it to, and I can see in my final draft that the conclusion I drew in the first draft has been explored further and my new claim is a more in-depth version of my first one.

# data[].attributes.body
When comparing my initial concept map for my second academic essay with the final draft that followed, I can see how I adapted my ideas over time. Initially, I wanted to choose one theory source and pick two exhibit sources that were examples of the theory. After a peer conference with Mathieu, I changed my idea entirely, instead deciding to write about Knowledge and Intersectionality in “White Bear.” Even after this change, I had a lot of trouble making a claim beyond the text about society and power. Despite this setback, I did eventually create work that I am proud of.

# data[].attributes.body
In this learning log from after my peer conference, I felt myself get out of a rut of not knowing what to write about. I decided to reorganize my essay and I thought that would fix my problem.

# data[].attributes.body
Dear Amanda,

My name is Rachel, I use she/her/hers pronouns, and I'm looking forward to taking your class this fall! I graduated high school in the class of 2020 and took a gap year in Israel before coming to Boston University. My gap year was amazing; I lived with people from 4 different countries, volunteered as a First Responder in ambulances, and took some informal Hebrew classes. As wonderful as my year was, I haven't been in a formal classroom setting since March of 2020, which definitely contributes to my anxiety about starting college. Nevertheless, the start of in-person classes excites me.

I registered for this course mostly because of all the available WR 120 classes that were available, the topic of prisons in our society interests me the most. When I was in elementary school, my family's favorite sushi restaurant was about 20 minutes away by car, and we would drive past the Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall. I remember feeling intrigued by the concept of children (in my head, they were my age) being locked in a prison. Later, in middle school, I began watching documentaries on Youtube about life in prison in different regions of the world. I learned about the prison system in Norway, where nearly all prisons are focused on rehabilitation, a stark comparison to U.S. prisons which make money off of their residents. The Norway prison system makes the U.S. prison system look cruel, seeming to strip prisoners of their humanity, one insult or mistreatment at a time.

I haven't, however, given a lot of thought about how I personally perceive prisons and how my surroundings have shaped those perceptions. For example, our first class today was my first real glimpse of how we, as a society, have been dehumanizing incarcerated people through portrayal in the media and our own day-to-day language. In this class, I hope to become more self-aware of my biases and perceptions and to actively work against those biases. Since I truly believe the first priority of prisons should be to rehabilitate its residents and prepare them to eventually reintegrate into society, I'd love to be more educated about how that change can genuinely happen given the structure of current prisons in the United States.

In high school, I took English 9A and 10A, followed by AP Lang. and AP Lit. I loved all of those classes, but I do feel like my writing style changed significantly when I took AP Lang. in my junior year. The AP English classes focused almost entirely on timed essays with specific formulas for each paragraph, which makes sense as it was really a test-prep course. I do, however, feel like my writing skills worsened during this time period. The essays were meant to be quick, and not thought-out or revised in any way. When it came time to write college applications, I felt nervous, because it had been so long since I had written multiple drafts of anything, let alone essays with complex and nuanced topics such as a personal statement essay.

When it comes to my strengths as a writer, I feel confident in my ability to express my ideas in a logical way, bringing the reader along with me. In person, I like to think I'm a good storyteller, and I hope that skill transfers into my writing abilities. I do struggle with the flow of the ideas as I'm writing, and I tend to feel like my transitions between my ideas are forced and formulaic. This semester, I hope to write more naturally, and to improve my writing lexicon as well. I would also like to get into the habit of writing more regularly, and get used to writing multiple drafts and to become more efficient with revisions and rewrites. Lastly, I look forward to learning about prisons in the U.S. and generally being more informed about what incarceration is really like and how the system can be improved.

Sincerely,

Rachel Loran

U77895455

# data[].attributes.body
The first draft of this essay is more developed than the other two first drafts because I put the work into an outline beforehand. My first draft outlines events in my life chronologically and I attempt to tie it into Crenshaw’s theory at the end. During my oral presentation of this essay, I felt compelled to restructure my argument into a way that made more sense while speaking. I realized this new structuring actually made more sense in writing too, and I rewrote the entire essay for my final draft. This was very effective, and resulted in an essay I am very proud of.

# data[].attributes.body
In this second learning log, I realized that simply restructuring my essay did not help me come up with a greater idea. I reflected on how I should have front loaded my analytical thinking about the topic, and I looked to the future to make sure I did better the next time.

# data[].attributes.body
What a semester it has been! As I look back on my writing in just the past three months, I see clear growth. I began the semester feeling very rusty about writing skills and nervous. As I wrote about in my initial self-assessment, I felt like my writing hadn’t been legitimately improved since the 2017-2018 school year and I was worried about how my writing in college would suffer from it. I wrote about wanting to improve the flow of my writing, steering away from formulaic writing as I had done in my AP English classes. My rustiness was apparent to me as I was writing my first essay especially. My first draft of “Andy Dufresne Living the American Dream” is very rough. I can see my formulaic sentences over and over again. While there is real analysis and I do ultimately make a claim at the end, one can clearly see the process was painful. This struggle is apparent in my second academic essay as well. The vague, open-ended prompts of college writing did not come easy to me after years of writing so formulaically. In the second academic essay, I improved at adapting my major ideas over time. This can be seen in the difference of ideas from my original concept map to the final draft of the essay. Still, however, I struggled to come up with a question relating to power that I could answer with my analysis of the class sources. This struggle took time, and I found myself in a rut of a mental block. Nevertheless, I persevered and ultimately did create a piece of writing that met my expectations. This was a learning experience and I realized I needed to take drafting seriously and front load the analysis. The “writing my thoughts until I had an idea” wasn’t always effective and I knew that for the next essay I needed to delegate my time more wisely. In my third essay, I changed my process accordingly. My first draft was much closer to final word count and I made a chronological outline of ideas I wanted to address along with a final claim before I even started my first draft. This prompt was also vague, and it took me quite a few days to come up with a topic I felt like I could write about adequately. Without conscious brainstorming, I ended up with an idea I was passionate about from the very beginning. This feeling was electrifying, and I let that enthusiasm carry over into a solid first draft. From then, presenting my work in progress to the class pushed me to completely reorganize my thoughts into a more cohesive structure that makes sense from a story-telling perspective. It is here that my writing voice came through. After being in a situation where I had to speak about my topic in front of the class, I developed language surrounding my topic that I could write with. I utilized my storytelling skills, which I originally wrote about in my self-assessment, and developed my personal voice, a goal I wrote about as well. In this final essay, my hard work paid off, and I now feel significantly more confident about my ability to draft cohesive and engaging writing that I am proud of.

WC: 547

# data[].attributes.body
1. Introduction

1. Introduction

2. Initial Self-Assessment

1. Initial Self-Assessment Email

3. Academic Essay #1

1. First Draft

2. Final Draft and Explanatory Caption

4. Academic Essay #2

1. Concept Map

2. Final Draft and Explanatory Caption

3. 11/5 Learning Log and Caption

4. 11/12 Learning Log and Caption

5. Autoethnographic Essay

1. Outline and Caption

2. First Draft

3. Final Draft and Explanatory Caption

4. Genre Analysis

6. Conclusion

1. Conclusion

# data[].attributes.body
Initially, I felt anxious about writing an autoethnographic essay. To be completely honest, I needed to look up what an ethnography was in order to understand what I was meant to write. After reading some autoethnographies in class, the genre began to grow on me. In “There Is No Home Like Place”, I really appreciated how personal the writing felt, as if I was listening to the author in conversation. I decided I wanted my essay to have a similar voice: professional and academic yet intimate and personal. Another difference in writing an autoethnography was that I felt encouraged to allow my personal biases to shine through in my argument, because my bias is the lens I see the world and I cannot make an argument without having those biases. Instead of pretending the argument is completely detached from a person with human opinions, this genre embraces humanity and encourages reflexivity.  I noticed myself feeling much more passionate about what I was writing about, since it was so personal. I ended up writing about a topic I had occasionally spoken with my friends about in one way or another, and it ended up feeling cathartic to fully flesh out my experience on paper. This genre feels similar to journaling, except with a twist where academic sources are brought into the conversation and related to personal experience. This personalization feels refreshing to me, and it is a genre I can see myself choosing to write in if given the opportunity in a future class.

WC: 253

# data[].attributes.body
As I look to the future, I see lots of room to continue developing the skills I have been working on in this class. I see how my writing has begun to shift away from formulaic writing and I absolutely would like to continue that in the future. With this shift, I believe, my voice will improve too. One of the goals I had set for myself was for my writing voice to sound academic and professional, yet read conversationally. I think there is still lots of room for this skill to develop. I hope to take the best parts of my writing voice from my autoethnographic essay and to continue improving my lexicon and variance in sentence structures. Throughout this semester, I also think I have developed writing strategies for the process of writing an essay. In the future, I’d like to maintain the practice of frontloading my work and to get into the habit of writing multiple drafts. I would also like to get into the habit of doing complete rewrites of my work. As of right now, the concept of doing a rewrite feels very daunting, because each draft takes so long for me to write. With practice, however, I expect that the time it takes me to write will decrease. Through future coursework, I hope to get enough practice just writing over and over again until it begins to feel natural and I can find my groove relatively quickly. Hopefully, finding my groove over and over again will mean I can write better, also more efficiently and consistently.

WC: 262