Blog #9

Blog #9

Short Story Essay Grading Reflection

Let me begin this blog by saying that while I do very much enjoy reading and analyzing literature, writing about it is not my forte. I have never falsely allowed myself to believe that I am a good writer nor will I ever attempt to win a Pulitzer Prize. With that being said I believe I can analyze the result of all the hard labor I put into writing my short story essay.

One of the major points that Mrs. Clinch brought up in the comments of my essay is that my thesis and topic sentences were not as strong as they could be. I completely agree with this statement. I had such a difficult time in composing and changing my thesis and topic sentence that once I finally settled on a major theme for my paper it still didn't sit right with me. I feel that I could have perhaps made the thesis more in depth with the major theme of the work as a whole. This would have resulted in stronger topic sentences. One way that I can keep this from happening in the future is to extract multiple themes or “so what?” from the text that I am analyzing. This would then allow me to use different point of views in construction my thesis and resulting topic sentences. Having more than one possible angle for a thesis would provide multiple facets for me to mold my information into. I feel that by focusing on one single “so what” such as I did in this paper, it forced me to have tunnel vision when creating my thesis and topic sentences. Perhaps making them sound forced or confused, and making them weaker than they should have been.

           Surprisingly Mrs. Clinch did comment that my argument was convincing, “but could be more so with deeper text support and analysis”. The deeper text support issue goes along with the problem and solution stated above. If I had a stronger thesis it would have allowed for more solid textual evidence and therefore a broader spectrum of text support to choose form thus allowing me to have deeper text support. The use of this deeper text support could have then allowed for more meat to base my analysis off of. While I believe that some fo the points made in my analysis were thoughtful and concise, they could have been flushed out more and therefore gone into more depth in order to completely support the other thesis and topic sentences that I had crafted for the bones of my essay. 

         Overall i completely respect that grading result and comments of my teacher regarding my paper. I will be sure to use these tips when composing the next paper. While i am fully aware that i will never be the next Pulitzer Prize winner i just may be able to finally make an "A" on an AP Lit essay.