Faculty Name | Section | Semester
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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My education narrative was pretty easy for me. I knew exactly when my thoughts on education changed and what they were before. All i really did was try to sort all of that information out in my head and try to create a timeline. Sometimes its hard putting into words every single detail about a specific moment in time. I guess it can make the story more interesting but in all honesty it bores me. Too many details, comments, creating this elaborate picture can often make me put something down when im reading. I like to get to the point figure out what this is about and end it.
My narrative education was kinda affect by it. My first draft was all over the place and wasn’t really that understanding. But once I wrote the final draft it started to make more sense but it was still a little confusing for some I feel. I feel pretty ok with my education narrative. I think it conveyed what I meant and the lesson I learned from that experience.
The process of writing my education narrative was somewhat easy, but I did have little difficulties. What I struggled with is trying to remember how everything went during the time period I was talking about, I was also trying to remember the feelings and emotions that were present. I thought I would struggle trying to reach the word count, but than that became something very easy for me, because once I started to gather more information, I had just poured it all out into the essay. I approached the assignment using “who, what, where, when, how”, I also used some imagery.
My first draft of my education narrative was chaotic and disorganized. Writing about my personal experiences caused a lot of my ideas and thoughts to be scattered. I had the information and knowledge, but I had trouble organizing it. I used the draft to help me write down all of my ideas, organize them, and make my writing formal. I forced myself to write what I wanted my reader to understand rather than worrying as much about my grammar and punctuation. After, I went through over my draft after I finished it and made adjustments. I made sure that my writing was formal, that my grammar was accurate, that my punctuation was fixed, and that I used writing techniques like dialogue, context, and flashbacks. This helped me structure mine writing and make mine essay better.
While writing my my education narrative I felt as though my options were limited. Not often have my thoughts on education notably deferred in my life. Yeah, I wrote a covid story, but everyone has written a covid story. I was attempting to conjure another narrative, but sadly nothing else came to mind. Hearing my peers stories such as getting left back in the first grade and the disappointed and sad look that their grandma gave really downplayed my work and what I had written. I have no interesting tales in my life, which is why I mostly dislike English classes in general when it comes to personal assignments. What am I suppose to do; get mauled by a bear or something? I’m just a normal guy, unfortunately.
To be honest reading the “ Shitty First Draft “ did not affect my writing that much. I approached the assignment with the easiest way possible. Which for me was to just tell a story like you are telling your grandchildren a story about your life. So I just simply told a story about one of my educational moments of my life. In the end I do not feel like my education narrative was that bad so I would not even call it “shitty draft”. Of course there is some improvements that have to be done but mostly I think it is ok.
The process of my education narrative was fun. Almost like being the director of a film and the star. You got to kind of relive through some moments while writing them. Some difficulties were opening up and making it personal. I’m good at writing stories but when it comes to myself I’m not as expressive about myself. It kind of makes you feel vulnerable and it’s an insecurity that I’m working in from a writers perspective.
The process of writing my education narrative was pretty difficult because I struggled putting my story into the paper. I had the story in my head, but on paper it sounded horrible. “Shitty First Drafts” did affect my writing process because it made me realize that I needed to make many changes to my writing. So I broke everything down and combined it. I took pieces of my story and wrote as much descriptive detail as I can. I did this day by day, as one day I’ll focus on one part and the next day I’ll focus on the other. I then took what I wrote each day and combined it, which was super helpful. I feel like my education narrative story was decent in the end. Up to now there’s still a lot I could do to make my story better. I feel like it’s never going to be perfect because it could always get better no matter what I have. The best part of writing was trying to make the reader feel the way that I felt. The worst part was transitioning from one thing to another because I struggled finding transition words and moving on to a new paragraph. But overall, it was fun.
writing my education paragraph was a complex. it was complex for me because I had to think back at all of the specific details that I never really thought about. also the dialogue was hard to think back about. other than that it was fun to write.
The process of writing my education narrative was pretty intensive and required a lot of self reflection. Organizing my own thoughts and memories proves to be the hardest part of it, I had to reevaluate a lot of small moments for how meaningful they were to me in hindsight as well as find narrative place for them to form an arc. I went through several different outlines and story structures before settling on one that I could move through. Narrative essays are often more difficult for me than informative ones to structure because there’s no situation or usual structure, it’s all your own work or experience and it’s hard to experiment.
Reading Shitty First Drafts was helpful to and extent, it took a bit of the pressure off of getting it on the page. However I’m of the belief that a piece of writing is never truly done, there are things that I would still change about what I wrote.
I believe my process of writing my education narrative was difficult at first as I couldn’t find the one specific moment but after reading other people’s moments and ” Shitty First Drafts .” I got more confident with what I was going to write about it. As I continued writing I was able to get more comfortable in the moments that I would be writing about. Writing about this education narrative has given me a different aspect of writing too cause it changes what is the traditional way of writing.
I have to admit that writing my educational narrative was fun and I really enjoyed writing it; the reason is that it was meaningful to me. From the beginning, I already knew what to write about, therefore the influence of “Shitty First Drafts” was not that important, although it helped me to draft my essay. During the process of writing my educational narrative, brainstorming was crucial, because I had a lot to convey, and I had to summarize somehow all the scenes and reflections. Then, I selected the most relevant parts of my story to set and structure them in concise and simple, although interesting paragraphs. Finally, I read and analyzed carefully my writing in order to make sure that it was clear and understandable for my readers. I also picked some arrangements and structures from the passages and readings we worked on in this first unit. In general, it was a great experience, I strengthened the hollow aspects of my writing and I learned a lot.
I think that “Shitty First draft” helped me a lot because at the beginning I had an issue where there was 3 instances of what I wanted to write but after doing the writing the draft, I noticed that there was one in particular that impacted me a lot, so I chose that one. The hardest part of me was dong the details so when we were in class writing about the details around us, that helped me a lot. After finishing my essay I looked back at the “shifty first draft” and was making sure that it was as descriptive as it was. I thought that writing this essay was going to give me a headache but while doing it, it didn’t feel like too much work and I was happy with the outcome.
My educational narrative was affected by the Shitty Fist drafts because it helped me realize not to make the first draft perfect. My first draft was really bad and my thoughts were all over and it didn’t make much sense. But it helped me gather my ideas and also helped me figure out what I wanted and did not want in the essay so I feel like a shitty first draft helped me. I felt like the education narrative was hard for me because I couldn’t remember many details that I wrote about. After all, it has been a while. I also find it hard to write about myself. I feel like my educational narrative was not perfect. It was not as good as I planned for it to be from the beginning but I liked the way it turned out in the end.
The process of my education narrative was very difficult for me because there were several situations that had changed my perspective about education throughout my life. And didn’t have all the information about each of the situations because it was a long time ago, so did a little research in my family because they knew more things that I didn’t know. Then with all the information that I got I was ready to start my essay but I didn’t know how to develop the structure of it. So I did many draft trying to figure out everything and it helps me to develop my essay.