TOW #27 - TOW Reflection

Thank you Mr. Yost for giving me this opportunity to improve my writing.

            When I look at the very first TOW I wrote in last summer, it is difficult for me to believe how much I progressed throughout the year. Up till my TOW #18, all of my TOWs were almost identical to each other like they were created from a same template, and looking back now, I think that was exactly what have been doing all along. I am satisfied to know that my TOW style have changed so that all information is not crammed into a single 350 word essay. At first, I tend to summarize all the books and the articles I read, but I soon learned to focus on the rhetoric devices that the authors were using and to decipher the message they were conveying. Of course, this meant that I had to break away from the single 350 word paragraph norm, but I am glad that I experimented with my style of writing because although my TOWs became longer, I was able to write more freely and more in depth about how the authors' techniques influenced how they revealed their purposes.

            With this in mind, I believe that I truly mastered distinguishing a summary from an analytical essay. This means that I now know up to what extent I am to describe  the background information of a source so that I can focus more directly on the author's purpose and the unique rhetorical devices the author used as a vessel to get his point across to his specified group of audience, where as in the past I would take up more than half of the entire TOW to simply write about what the source was about and then cram the analysis in as last two sentences. This does not mean that I completely mastered analyzing sources to the deepest extent. Although I have been practicing, I still have to recognize the complexity of every issue by  addressing the questions "so what?" and "why?" properly. I feel like that I touch upon the surface of the topic, but I never seem to go deep into it to the point where my audience would derive any new perspective from my TOWs. I do hope that that will change once I practice my writings more in the future.

            I am very well aware that TOWs were designed to help the students with their analytical skills, and I think they really did help me with the essay writing during the AP exam. Although the TOWs gave me only a sense of how deep analysis can go in an analysis essay, they taught me other very valuable lessons: They opened my eyes to a variety of rhetorical devices that I would have easily overlooked (heck, I did not even know the term "rhetorical device" at the beginning of the year!) and helped me understand how each rhetorical gives off some kind of unique feeling to the audience. I realize now that with all the different combinations of different rhetorical devices, the author can portray the same message in many different ways ("many" would be an understatement...more like "limitless"?). In a very general sense, I think TOWs were really helpful simply because they forced me to write every week so that my writings would never be rusty. Although they really were a pain sometimes (they still can be), I am glad that I put my time and effort into them.