During the time period that I had to complete the Literacy Narrative Essay, I made an outline including all of my ideas, so I would take my time to think before I started writing. At first, I believed that it would be complicated to write an essay over literacy, but as I got further into the writing, I started to realize that it wasn't as difficult as I thought. I was able to take my time to make my stories descriptive and developed. An example of a sentence that I took my time on is, "Past experiences, including preschool, made an impact on my literacy development." Although I was worried about this essay, I remained calm and completed it.

When I started the Analyzing a Visual Essay, I first read through the essay description. After I did this, I wanted to start my essay right away because I thought that it was going to be simpler than the Literacy Narrative Essay. However, I am glad that I used the whole two weeks I was given to finish it because in those days we talked about comma rules, attention getters, citing, and how to write a good transitional sentence. An example of practice that we did was the topic and transition sentences worksheet shown above. I had to write down sentences that I could use to help make my essay flow better. This worksheet assisted me to stay on topic and manage my impulsivity. 

When I was writing the Analyzing a Visual Essay, I had to listen with understanding when we did peer editing. For this essay, we had to complete two rough drafts. In total, I had thirty-seven comments on how I could improve my writing. I didn't want to take this feedback in a negative way because my peers were just trying to help me get a better understanding of the essay. Additionally, I used empathy when I was trying to understand what it was like to be in the other person's shoes. For example, I told Chloe, one of my peers, that I didn't care what she said as long as it was helpful to make my essay better. As seen in the screen recording above, one comment that she made was to change the words "many more sea turtles" to "anymore sea turtles", so it would support my visual claim more. Without this change, it would sound like I was okay with a few more turtles dying. In addition to this comment, she also made multiple more suggestions that helped me to succeed.

In the I-Search Essay, I created a survey for the research part, so I had to consider what everybody said when they were answering the questions. I had to understand other people’s point of view in order to see what other people thought about the topic. For all eleven participants of the survey, I had to read through their responses, and write down what they thought even if I did not agree with them. The questions that I asked can be viewed at the top, and as seen, they could have many different answers. Knowing this, I had to make sure that I reflected on all of the different responses.

I had to think flexibly and consider my options when choosing the criteria and appeals that I used for the Analyzing a Visual Essay. There were multiple criteria to choose from, and there are three different appeals that can be used for different persuasive methods. I used the appeals of pathos and ethos to persuade my audience to recycle plastic bags and save the animals being affected. Additionally, I choose to use text, social context, and composition for my criteria to support my claim for the visual above. Another time that I had to think flexibly was when I was writing the counter argument for the essay. I had to think about what other people might view the visual as because they might disagree with the criteria or appeals that I choose. Some people might think that the image above uses the appeal of ethos more than the other two. Even though I did not agree with this, I still had to think about what other people may say to complete my counterargument.

For the I-Search Essay, I had to think flexibly when deciding on what sources to use for my research. I had to consider my options because each of them had their own setbacks and advantages. I found an online article about my topic of dreams, and it had a lot of random facts that would be helpful to answer all of the questions that I had. However, this article didn't answer all of my questions. One question that still lingered in the air was what lucid dreams were. I went on to find an article from BGSU's online database. It contained information on lucid dreams. Each of these sources made me find a different way to acquire information.

For my Literacy Narrative Essay, I had to be aware of my own thoughts, so I didn’t start to think too fast and forget what I already came up with. For this essay, I had a ton of ideas that I had to think about for my stories, but I had to make sure that what I wanted to say made sense. Thinking about my ideas helped me to realize that some of them supported my claim more. Additionally, I first thought that the Literacy Narrative Essay was just about giving examples of my literacy experiences to support my claim. I was confused because my teacher, Ms. Martin, kept saying that there should be a narrative included in this assignment. I didn't understand how I was going to be able to incorporate a detailed story about my experiences because most of them were short activities that I did everyday. After I read the "Reading on the Farm" excerpt by my teacher, Ms. Martin, I was able to think about the different ways that I could add information to create a detailed narrative. I was confused at first, but after I thought about why I was confused, I was able to complete this essay relatively easily. 

When I was writing the Analyzing a Visual Essay, I was able to think about my thoughts. I had to think about whether or not my thoughts that I wrote down to explain my visual were descriptive enough for people to understand what I was thinking. If they were confused, I could rewrite them to make them clearer. I also had to reread the sentences of my essay to see if they were really conveying what I wanted to say. One of my sentences that I had to think about to see if it was really what I meant is explained in the video above.

When I was editing my Literacy Narrative Essay, I noticed that my narratives were not very descriptive. I went back through and added details that helped the audience to feel like they were in my story. One sentence that I fixed to make it sound better says, "One summer night in late July, my siblings and I were trying to get ready for bed really fast, so we would be able to read a book." I wanted to do my best on the narrative part of the essay because I set high standards for myself. After I corrected the content of my essay, I edited it at least three times for grammar. Each time I found more mistakes that could be fixed. One grammar error that I made was I forgot to capitalize the name of a language. Before I submitted the final draft of the Literacy Narrative Essay, I had my teacher, Ms. Martin, and my peer, Chloe, read it because I wanted more opinions on what I could improve on. Overall, I strived for accuracy by checking multiple components of the essay through different perspectives. 

For the Analyzing a Visual Essay, we read through example essays before starting to write our own. After I read these samples, I wanted to go above and beyond the expectations for this essay to match how good other people have done before. Striving for accuracy helped me to receive the grade that I got on this essay. As you can see above, I got ninety-six percent on this writing because of the effort that I gave and the attitude that I had. Additionally, I had to complete two rough drafts for this writing because I had to do one for content and one for grammar. My teacher, Ms. Martin, gave me numerous comments on how to improve. For instance, one suggestion that she gave me was to change the word "was" to "could be" in a sentence to make it sound less absolute. In the image at the top of this page, I displayed the sentence that I changed. 

For the Literacy Narrative Essay, I had to apply knowledge that I learned in the past of writing narratives in order to write a great story and understand how it should be organized. Something that I learned before entering college writing was that a narrative can be a story from the point of view of the main character. I also had to bring back my understanding of the word literacy in preparation for writing the Literacy Narrative Essay. I could remember that literacy means the ability to read and write. Considering this, I was capable of understanding that the literacy experiences I had in my childhood would be used to support my literacy claim in my narrative. Recalling this old information helped me to accomplish my goals for this essay.

I have done research papers before in other classes, so I knew how to cite sources from the internet in my I-Search Essay. I made sure to cite all of the information that I obtained from outside sources, so I wouldn't be plagiarizing this information. It is important to use citations because they are necessary to give credit to other authors. An example of an in-text citation that I was able to create from my past knowledge is as follows: (qtd. in Cherry). I also used grammar skills that I gained understanding of in the past to make sure that my essay had few errors. For instance, I have learned about introductory phrases in a sentence in my previous classes. Because I knew this, I was capable of placing commas in the correct place for this type of sentence.