In the Alchemist essay, I did have some well thought-up ideas and managed to write them down in a way that made sense, but I think my lack of supporting details and evidences brought the quality of the entire essay down by a bit. Sometimes I went off topic and sometimes I had only had a single sentence to back my ideas up, which just wasn’t good enough now that I’m going over it again and reflecting my work. However, as I moved into the Julius Caesar unit and wrote my essay at the end about one of the characters: Brutus, I found that I was capable of writing down my thoughts at a faster rate and backing them up with appropriate and clear explanations and reasons. I selected several quotes from the book itself to prove some of my statements and referred back to the topic every once in a while, making sure that I didn’t go off topic. Overall, I think I did a much better job in the second essay at grabbing the reader’s attention with interesting points every once in a while and having clear and straightforward ideas. But I could still improve by adding a more backing evidence since I wasn't descriptive enough at providing evidence to some of my thoughts and having a few more deep and nicely thought up ideas.
Organization
Compared to my Alchemist essay, the organization of my Julius Caesar essay had slightly improved. I started my essay off with an interesting and attention-grabbing introduction paragraph and ended it with a brief, yet clear and accurate summary of my entire essay. Also, transition sentences and words in my essay helped it to flow from one topic to another naturally and the overall improvement in the organization of my Julius Caesar essay will make it easier to read and understand for the reader. Nevertheless, there is still room for more improvement which I believe, would once again show in my future essays depending on how much time I get to organize my essay, because time limit was one of the factors that brought the overall quality of my essay down by a bit. I should try planning the essay in more detail ahead of time.
Personal Growth
I noticed a significant improvement between my Alchemist essay and my Julius Caesar essay. When I referred back to my Alchemist essay during the reflection session, I realized that I had done a worse job than I thought when I first wrote it. Now that I have had a look at both of my essays, I could see that I have managed to stayed much more to the topic, had a much better organization of the whole essay and had a hugely improved introduction paragraph which was more interesting and attention-grabbing in my Julius Caesar essay compared to my Alchemist essay. This is probably because I have learnt a lot more about writing techniques and styles after I had written my Alchemist essay and spent more time preparing for the essay since the time was limited. And although I had some briefly described points here and there throughout the whole essay, I think that there has been a lot of improvement in the past months. But I do believe there is still some room for more.
SLR Reflection
When I was writing both my essays about The Alchemist and Julius Caesar, I used almost all of the SLRs to make my essay “successful”. However, I think the SLR: Reason Critically was the one I used the most in writing up both essays. I believe that I used this SLR the most because my objective in both of the essays was to get my idea across to the reader clearly by providing appropriate explanations and reasoning which would back up my opinion about the topic. Therefore, it was important for me to reason critically and come up with precise and appropriate supporting details. I tried my best to think as deep as possible in order to get the “perfect” reasons that would prove my thoughts.
