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.
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