- My final thesis statement was that Wallace’s theories are something worth adopting into my life because they serve as tools to help make me more empathetic and generally more happy. I arrived at my thesis kind of just by creating a graphic organizer for my thoughts before i wrote the paper. I knew that I agreed with Wallace and his points but I wasn’t exactly sure why. Once I started to collect text evidence from the speech to use in my essay I found that much of his message was about gaining empathy and not being so down in the dumps about stupid inconveniences in your life, leading to the specifics of Wallace’s theories that I believe in.
- I think that my strength in this essay was my understanding of each of the pieces and how I could make them relate to each other easily. Taking the time to reread and annotate each piece of writing really helped me to connect the two of them and put them in conversation much more easily. In my free draft I didn’t have a Barclay paragraph but during revision I added one and I think (or at least hope?) that it made my claim stronger and made the connection between Paterniti and Wallace more clear for the reader.
- During my final revisions I focused the most on making sure that my thesis was being supported in each paragraph. I also tried to make sure that I had as much of my own voice in each section of my paper so that it didn’t get lost between the intro and conclusion.
- The most challenging part of this essay for me was definitely adding my own voice, something I often find challenging in academic essays. I can never tell how much of my own voice or opinion is too much so I tend to include less rather than more (when I should probably do the opposite). A lot of the times I feel like I have so much to say but I either don’t know how to get my message across effectively, or I feel like what I have to say is too much and I won’t have enough room to include other necessary components such as a Barclay paragraph or summary.
- I don’t feel as confident in my second essay as my first one probably because the majority is about how I could get my voice across to those who are reading it rather than specific questions that need to be answered about the actual text that we read. Essay number two was much easier for me to relate to but it seemed to be harder for me to find real life examples for essay two than it was for essay one.
- I definitely struggle the most with conclusions (specifically relating them to the introduction) so that’s something that I would like to spend more time working on.
