akz+reflection

When this was assigned, I was very anxious. I have very few stories I feel comfortable sharing with an entire class of people. I have plenty of stories, just personal ones. As I searched through my brain for a story that is worth telling I found the one I was looking for. Transferring schools every year made me different. It was a good story to tell and one I had never written down before. I look at is as a healing process and a way to remember it forever. I knew it would be long, and for this assignment it needed to be. I was still a little worried no one would particularly care about it though.

The zero draft was my favorite part. First hearing about it in class I thought it was very irrelevant to write a draft that wasn’t the full version of your story and without punctuation or anything like that, but once again since it was assigned it is what I did. Turns out I got a lot out of it. I ended up typing a good two to three pages just off the top of my head and it was a huge relief to have ideas already on paper. I couldn’t believe how much I had to say and that the basics of my paper had fallen into place so easily. From that point on it seemed to be so much easier to edit and format my paper.

For the first draft I had very little to do. I focused mainly on formatting the things that I had not done in my zero draft such as paragraphs and spacing. Already my paper looked official, yes there were some errors in what I was trying to say but it looked good to me for a first draft. I read over it a couple times for just my own checking and then brought it in to be looked over by my group.

The second time I edited this paper was by far the easiest. I had to revise some parts and add in more details to make it more clear. I wanted the audience to feel as if they were in my shoes. I did take a lot of time trying to go back in time and explain the things I felt and saw in the best way possible. Although this was easy for this paper, I think I need more help in this area of writing. I need to learn how to be more descriptive and use better wording to describe my feelings. There are so many words in the English language and I need to use them to the best of my ability. I feel this class will help me in that aspect. I tried in my mind to remember the way the article “Baby Bulimic” was written because it was so descriptive and had an enormous amount of explanation for even the smallest things. I wish my writing ability was that good.

For the final editing of my paper I added the title which came to me immediately, I felt as if it was a pretty good one. I’m normally good at coming up with titles. I also added the proper heading and date and printed it out. I accidentally had to print it out a total of three times because the first time the printer for some reason printed it double sided and the second time the date wasn’t correct, but third times a charm.

^^ what I would do again? I think the way I did this memoir was pretty effective. I wrote about a story that I do not mind sharing with a lot of people, and also I believe memoirs are also for yourself as well, so this was a great paper to reflect on my past and how my past has changed me. I really enjoyed this assignment because even though it was required, it was something that I will enjoy looking back on.