Hits and Misses

     One of my hits this year was the research paper. I consider this to be my greatest hit because I enjoyed what I was writing about. This enjoyment of my topic is not only what drove me to spend way to much time on it, but it is also what gave me a first hand experience of hard work paying off. While writing the research paper, I did an excellent job of making claims, then backing those claims up with specific evidence, which made my writing organized, accurate, and enjoyable. Another aspect of the research paper that I did well was my sentence fluency. After writing the article, I went back in and added transitions, backstory, and explanations to each paragraph. The small details and transitions that I imputed are what made the paper a smooth read. Aside from the writing tools that made the article a hit, I believe that the real reason that I consider this paper a hit was because of what I learned from it. This paper taught me to be patient with my writing, and to get a second opinion about something that I am unsure about. All in all, my research paper was a hit because of my passion for the topic, the evidence I provided, my sentence fluency, and how I learned to ask for help if I don't know something.
     While I did have some hits this year, I did have some big misses. My worst miss was my poems. These were such a big miss because I was not used to writing poems and my poems did not have a unified plot. Before this year, I had rarely written any poetry. This is because I preferred writing about a story with a set plot, setting, and characters, whereas in verse there is no backstory provided, small ideas shape the plot, and characters can be any number of objects. Since I was used to a different type of writing, I always felt that my poems fell short of their goal. The other reason why I consider my poems to be a miss is the plot. When I wrote poems, I used tons of similes. In my opinion, these similes distracted from the plot because although they made the poetry flowery, they also drew attention to something separate from what was concretely occurring in the poem. Thus, while I enjoyed the role similes played in my poems, I felt like they drew attention away from the plot. All in all, my poetry writing assignments were a miss because they did not have a concrete plot and because I was new to that style of writing.