Narrative Reflection

The comments I received from peer response were mostly positive and not very concrete. The response from the professor more specific and made me rethink the entire structure of my paper. I felt like I hadn’t addressed all of the questions of the assignment and felt that the initial structure of my paper, which was almost entirely a history of my reading and writing experiences with little analysis, did not suit the needs of the assignment. In revising my paper, I started off with a completely blank slate and took bits and pieces of the original draft to incorporate them back into the paper. It was a very long and agonizing process. My original thought was to just change the introduction and conclusion to address the lack of analysis but then decided a lot of the other content I had included was irrelevant.

One of the things I liked about this teacher response is that it made me think and asked me questions to consider where my paper was lacking. Rather than focusing on sentence-level errors, it paid more attention to the overall content and structure of my paper. Although I felt the need to complete rehaul my paper after reading the teacher comments, I feel that this overhaul was needed to meet the assignment requirements.

Documenting my writing process forced me to pay much more attention to my process than I have in the past. As I mentioned in class, I am often a one draft and done type of person, and I do a lot of my prewriting / brainstorming before I even start writing anything down. I also talk a lot to the people around me as I am brainstorming to get my ideas out in the open before they make it to the page. This time around, I did a lot more revision than I have previously. I think the amount of time that lapsed between drafts both helped and hindered this. It helped give me distance from the original work but also made me want to eliminate a lot of my original work.

This assignment forced me to really take an inventory of my previous experiences and not just list them out in an elaborate narrative but really pull out which experiences were the most relevant to my topic. I had to do a lot of soul searching and I had to distance myself from the topic for a while because I brutally cut so much out. In retrospect, I think I may have been too harsh on myself and that I could/should have kept more of my original content.

If this assignment were adapted to a first-year writing course, I think my original rambling narrative may have been enough. My original focus was that I felt extrinsically motivated to excel in literacy activities and that the awards and recognition were what I sought. In the end, however, I decided this did not meet the needs of this class and that the teacher was looking for a more profound and complex analysis and conclusion. For an FYC teacher, grading these assignments could prove a challenge because any judgment placed on a student’s personal literacy narrative could be a personal attack on their life experiences. I think I may have felt this way a little at first when I realized not all my experiences were necessarily relevant to the overall goal of this assignment.