​     My year in AP English Language and Composition has been tumultuous at best. I have gone through countless arguments and missed deadlines and refusals to cooperate all to achieve the goal to become a better writer. And I am still not done.

 

     I came into the class only knowing how to write a literary analysis, persuasive, and creative pieces. I had no idea there could be any other type of essay. There are actually 3 other types of essays, all of which I managed to somewhat master over the course of a school year. Rhetorical Analysis was my biggest challenge, followed by DQR, and lastly Synthesis.

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     Rhetorical Analysis is by far the most difficult for me due to its highly analytical nature and I struggled with it constantly throughout the year. In the beginning, I always wanted to pull from the words themselves instead of the strategic manner in which they were placed. After I caught on to what the rest of the class had seemingly already understood, I had difficulty enunciating my support for my argument: I could not put my thoughts into words. During class, we would go over an essay and think of ways to develop our commentary. I would always have so much to say and would be able to say it fairly eloquently and got cut from the discussion for it often. However, when I went to write on paper the same exact things, I could not seem to formulate the correct structure for my thoughts. Mrs. B would never understand what I was trying to say, no matter the correctness. Swim season started during our learning of Rhetorical Analysis and that was a disaster. I tried to come in the morning and work on it with Mrs. B, but my mom soon disallowed that, wanting me to miss practice. I started working on my essays later and later because I hated doing them and my work just got worse and worse. I just withdrew from the class until something new happened: DQR.

 

     When DQR came around, I was ready for something new. I loved DQR because I did not have to rely on the text and to explain what the text was doing and how the author did this and that. I could think of my own examples to support my own position of the prompt. They were persuasive pieces and something I was good at and something I liked and something that was new and I loved writing them. Until I started getting bad grades again and just stopped trying. I had improved, yes, but not by much. I was becoming a better writer even though I did not know it. By this time, I could pull examples out of thin air and use them to support me in an argument and even use an opponent's examples against him. But I still did not like it and I wanted to get out of there. I hated spending hours on an essay only to receive an E on the whole paper. I stopped writing papers altogether until one day something made me want to write them.

 

     Timed essays came at the perfect time. They were some structure that was preventing me from spending 2 hours or more on an essay but only writing an hour and a half because that was how fast everyone was going. They had to be turned in at a certain time and I based my schedule after school on this deadline. However, once Mrs. B mentioned other students were turning in their papers late and could get away with it, I started to do that too. Nothing was working and the only thing I was getting better at was getting worse.

 

     We still had another type of essay to do, one which I love and still love doing. They are by far the easiest essay for me even though I have never managed to get above a 7 on anything. Synthesis. It uses documents and you make the documents speak to each other to better prove your argument and suddenly everything made sense and I loved English again. I could write them with ease and got my best scores on those papers and they made me feel good. Synthesis made me feel motivated enough to try Rhetorical Analysis again and see if I could get any better.

 

     I did get better at Rhetorical Analysis, whether from my new found confidence from Synthesis papers or from Saturday sessions, but I was able to write a decent rhetorical analysis in about half an hour, give or take five minutes, by the time the actual exam rolled around.

 

     Throughout the year, we used many techniques to try to improve our scores. For us, it was all about the score, and for me personally, that score was a 5. I never got 5's, but whenever I did, I would practically jump for joy because I did something right.

     After we started rounds of peer editing, my friend Rachel told me about how she would improve her sentences with better words and better phrasing and I began to do the same. It was rocky at first, but nevertheless I got better. It was rarely my actual analysis that needed help, but rather the articulation of my thoughts

I have since become a much better writer than I was a mere 9 months ago. Not only can I pull quotes to back up my argument, persuade someone of my position using reason, and create elaborate stories, but I can also use the structure of a sentence to support the author, convince an audience of the truth behind my position using examples from almost anything, and create an argument using various articles. I literally could not have accomplished so much without the help of my teacher and peers as well as my trusty thesaurus. Practicing everyday is the best possible way to improve in AP English 11, and the tens of essays in my English folder on my computer can attest to that.