One piece that I think effectively shows off my ability to write fairly well is my Narrative Essay. For this paper, we were supposed to take something that was important from our childhood and that we still found important in our modern lives. I think that this shows my skills fairly well because it is in a bit of reflective style while also having some aspects of research in it that are pretty apparent and necessary as the topic is somewhat academic in nature and needed me to learn something before I could tell other people about them. The thing that I somewhat liked about this paper was that it forced you to write and think in a personal way as well as in an academic way at least for mine where I lightly touched on some science. The problem is that I’m not very comfortable writing about myself and about my past so writing this was forcing myself to broaden my writing abilities in a way that I would not have done on my own simply because I would rather not focus on myself.

The other piece that I would say best shows off my writing ability and was also a challenge to write would be my Research Paper, which was a completely different style than what I preferred to write which is less formal. This was probably the paper that I put the most effort and amount of time into this year as just the level of detail that was required was much higher than anything we had ever done yet. This paper forced me to find scholarly sources and implement them smoothly into my paper and what I was talking about when I inserted that quote into it. While quote integration has always been something that I have somewhat struggled with I feel that I did a very good job in this paper of quoting and paraphrasing to reinforce the points that I was making. This paper was also difficult because you were supposed to remove all uses of the first person, which for someone who prefers to write informally was a struggle as I like to integrate myself into the writing in some capacity even if it’s just putting my opinion out there. The research paper went through several drafts that took it from being basically a short few paragraphs to several pages as I filled in the details and expanded on the points that I wanted allowing me to draft several copies just adding some more content each time I went and touched it up more.

Overall these two pieces are somewhat similar it’s just that the Narrative Essay was more personal than the Research Paper which was just like it sounds to learn and inform others about a topic. I think that these two pieces really helped me to improve my writing style and try to write in a style that I wasn’t very comfortable with. While looking back on these two there are definitely things that I would fix in both, however, I think that there would be a problem if at this point in my English I didn’t find things wrong with my older writing that if I was doing it now I would attempt to fix and change rather than it just being a part of my writing.