Write a short reflective letter (150-200 words) about the process of writing your education narrative.
In your letter, discuss whether or not reading “Shitty First Drafts” affected your writing process. If so, how? If not, discuss how you approached the assignment. How do you feel about your education narrative in the end?
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I feel pretty confident in my essay because for something that happened so long ago I’m pretty surprised I remembered so much and got into as much detail as I could. The reading of first shitty drafts didn’t really change much in my writing it just gave me a new perspective that I should be using when revising my drafts. The way I approached my essay was first trying to remember everything that happened in as much detail as I could. I wouldn’t think to hard though because when I actually would Start the writing the memories would start to come back to me and I would remember more as I went on. Then I tried to plan out what was going where and made the important paragraphs long and the not so important ones short.
I still procrastinated but I was way more dramatic than I should’ve been because it really wasn’t that hard. I used the technique we used in class about describing the whole scene and felt It made my story more descriptive.
The process of writing my education narrative consisted of blurting everything onto a page, which created a draft, and then once I was satisfied with the amount of information I told, I reread and reread to fix any grammar mistakes, repetitions, lock of/too much detail, and more. This is what transforms a draft into a final version. I always read it a couple of times before submitting it.
The process of me writing my education narrative was kind of difficult to do because I felt like it was so much that I wanted to include but I didn’t know how to go about doing it. & it also made me very emotional because the event that I was writing about was such a traumatizing experience where it was a lot of emotions involved & tied into it. Making it hard for me to get my words out correctly & being able to put things into how I want to say it. Without me feeling like l don’t make any sense.
I forgot about “Shitty First Drafts” to be honest.
For this assignment, I definetly did not write well. The first day of the assignment, I wanted to write about money, and how I can’t seem to save much. But there were so many small stories I would have told, that the thought of writing about it was overwhelming. Then, I decided to move away completely from money, and write about skating and how it has taught me about injuries and such, but I didn’t really know where to go from there, or how to really elaborate on it. So, I decided on something different last minute, literally wrote the whole thing on Monday.
I don’t think it was a good story or well written though. If I rewrote it, maybe I’d write it better.
My process of writing the educational narrative was to just write everything that I could remember down in chronological order. Anything that I believed had anything to do with what I was trying to write about, I just put it down into text. “Shitty First Drafts” didn’t really affect my writing. I feel like my writing has always been like this for years when it comes to writing something that had anything to do with my past. I have great difficulty in remembering details of my life. I can only remember the event that took place. It was very difficult to write a narrative when the whole event could be summerized in one or two sentences. I think word count would have usually been a struggle, but this time it just happened to be enough. I think that I should probably be thinking about how I can improve my ability to write, but I’m honestly too lazy to do so.
My process of writing my educational narrative was clear but I was unsure if I was explaining my point overall how I intended to. I knew what I wanted to write about but I think the thought of having to have 1000 words made me lose focus. Or maybe it was just me losing track since when I explain a story I also start to lose explain another situation since in order for me to explain I want them to know the full story. Then I improved by elaborating more and putting in the little details since they help shape the overall story. I feel that my narrative at the end is good but not the best, I like the situation I picked since it was a reflection of how I feel now. It showed my growth and how I handle situations. Helped me reassure my motivation to what i choose as a career.
I think in my essay I had a lot of things I could have fixed to do better and I could have changed the way I organized my essay and added more details guarding the subject
During the process of writing my education narrative, I had to think back to middle school and high school because those were times when I didn’t value my education. I think reading “Shitty First Drafts” helped me throughout the process of me writing my education narrative because it helped me understand that my first draft isn’t going to be perfect, but it’s going to improve as I get to the final draft. In the end, I feel good about my education narrative because I added many details about my view on education and how my perspective on education changed throughout my life.
Coming up with a shitty draft helped me alot when writing my educational narrative, it help me seat up my story from the beggining till end. I was able to go deep in details it made my story sound ten times better. It did get a bit diffucult in certain paragraphs in which i was saying too much or too less.
To begin with, my first draft of my work was just a bunch of ideas and little memories that would help me remember how everything happened and make it easier for me to create the structure of my work. This draft was just the first one and then I created a new one, completing better ideas and discarding the ones that I didn’t remember much or that didn’t add much to my work and this affected my work in two ways. The first was that it made me have a better memory when writing my work and it was just as similar to what I remember but the other was that in some parts the transition felt very abrupt and unnatural. But despite this, my experience with this job was quite uncomfortable because I don’t like to remember that particular moment because of what happened and the embarrassing moments it put me through.
My process of writing my educational narrative was complex but in the end, it made sense. First, I struggled with finding a topic to connect back to education just because I felt like the assignment was vague. You could connect education to anything that you wanted to. I like to have something specific to write about free writing is not my strong suit. I contemplated different ideas and then finally I decided to stick to one topic. “Shitty First Drafts” did help me to the extent I tried to stick with the same imagery. The author used a lot of imagery and the details he added to the story were very attentive in displaying his main thoughts.
Writing my first piece, the education writing was sort of difficult because it was certain details I had to add and explain it in a way that I wasn’t going on forever but put important details to the point where you would understand where I’m coming from and understand the feeling that I was feeling. Reading shitty first drafts really helped me with the confidence of my writing because in shitty first drafts they explain how it’s not meant to be perfect and how this is just the brainstorming part and really just an outline for the final draft. So when writing my writing I felt okay with how it was coming out because ideas were still flowing and I was getting like “writers block” but because I had a outline I was able to reread what I had and get the ideas flowing again. But the writing piece was a somewhat okay, just difficult on the part where I had to write a lot or go in to detail but overall I think it was good to write about something that I felt was my experience.
For my educational narrative, I did a decent job writing it. I feel that I did well in this assignment because I could explain plain past events well and I felt that going into detail about the things that occurred in the past really worked well for me. I say this because it allowed me to explain my viewpoints on education and how it did not affect me when encountering it back then. I also like how I described how I felt because it allowed me to show the audience how it would be if they were in my position at that time and showed them the reasoning for the actions that I took. Explaining my thought process also allowed me to show the audience my course of action so I could follow my choice’s dream career and how it influenced me to go to the schools I have attended in the past.
I feel for writing a narrative about education, I might need a little bit more work to make sure that my writing has a good flow but I feel that I did a good job in the end.
I approach my essay with a surprising level of confidence, delving into memories of a past event and detailing them as vividly as possible. The reading of initial drafts didn’t drastically alter my writing but provided a fresh perspective for revision. Initially, I focused on recalling details without overthinking, allowing memories to resurface during the writing process. Planning became crucial, emphasizing important paragraphs and streamlining less significant ones. The challenge lay in balancing the desire to include everything while structuring the narrative coherently. Emotions ran high, given the traumatic nature of the event, making it difficult to articulate my thoughts precisely. Despite the emotional hurdles, the process led to a reflective exploration of my education narrative.