My Progress as an AP Writer

With the last AP essay of my 11th grade year over with, I look back on my previous essays and notice... nothing. My writings skills have more or less stagnated, with minimal improvement based on my writing logs. Does this mean I didn't learn anything? On the contrary, I gained a lot of writing knowledge throughout the year, even if my writing log doesn't reflect that.

Let's look at my writing from the very beginning of the year: the summer reading nonfiction rewrite. This is the first essay with an AP grade of 11 AP, albeit not the first essay written. This is a perfect reflection of the skills I gained from 10 Honors, as we had yet to learn or develop writing skills specific to the semester. I wrote on Quiet by Susan Cain, and the prompt was on how the author used specific devices to convey her purpose. I consider rhetorical analysis my worst skill and topic to write about, but this was not the lowest score I received throughout the year. I got a 6 (which is honestly pretty typical for me); my strength was a "good observation of [the] author's purpose and tone discussion," and my challenges were being "[un]specific with language analysis/devices" and "need[ing] to explain more." I quote this from the previous writing log, so it's my own writing. ...That sounds like me: having a good claim, but not having much explanation or development. (As you'll soon see, I write "good claim" or something similar in the "Strength" column of my writing log for practically all of them. Clearly, I don't know my own strengths.) At the beginning of the year, I often included extra information and I failed to expand my analysis. This was mostly due to me failing to truly comprehend the texts I was given, so I just gave "padding" on what I felt was a correct interpretation. It was good enough, but I needed to do better.

For the second full AP test, I turned in the rhetorical analysis. I felt it was my weakest out of the three and poorly written (before the rewrite). Unlike everything else, the strength I wrote here is slightly different: "clean analysis of excerpt." Well, it's not just the claim that's clear; the section that matters the most—the analysis—was clear. At this point in the year, I gained a lot more experience writing rhetorical analysis than at the start of the year. I read a lot of sample papers, and my mind was refreshed on particular strategies to use and ways to do rhetorical analysis (for example, tracing the argument). I got a 7 on this essay, which doesn't seem like much of an improvement. The fact that it was rhetorical analysis in and of itself, however, is already proof that something has improved. I was able to find stronger and more specific rhetorical devices, and I expanded my analysis to account for implications and deeper meaning. Of course, that was a result of reading the essays of other people and learning the skills in class.

As is evident in my writing logs, my strengths, weaknesses, and scores are pretty much the same. Like last year, they go up and down with no real pattern. Nevertheless, I still feel like I grew as a writer. I feel like I already know my style, so reading someone else's essay for guidance wasn't a big influence. Those essays, alongside lessons during class, helped teach me what I should look for in a prompt and in text. Both of these taught me how to delve deeper in the text and have greater understanding of the author's purpose. The only thing that was holding me back was actually reading more texts and essays for practice and advice. I definitely faced other roadblocks: often times I had no idea what I was writing and still did not understand what was being asked (yet those somehow always turn better than ones where I feel know what I am writing on, so who am I to judge). If I want to improve even more, I'll definitely need to read more books and other pieces of writing, and I'll need to read more closely as well. Reading more helps me more easily understand what authors want to convey, and it also expands my knowledge of the world, allowing me to be a more active citizen and to take stances on more subjects. At the very least, I feel I've achieved my goal from 10th grade (more or less): to expand my thoughts and to be more succinct with my writing.