Improvements Essay

        Improvments to myself

School is in many ways a growing experience, and when you grow there will always be growing pains. The pain of trying to improve yourself is by far the most important, since we all can improve in certain ways. Last quarter I wrote an essay for my english class that focused aroud a sociology class’s prompt. When I wrote it, I let my socioligical imagination go crazy, by pouring every idea that came to mind into my essay. However, like many of my essays it could use some improvements in staying on track, and in being structured in a more reader friendly way, as well as including some more of John Fox’s ideas

In John Fox’s “Sociological Imaginantion essay” rubric, Mr. Fox asks the writer to describe the relationship between his or her life or “Biography” to the greater History that was in motion during their life. This relates directly from a piece called the “Sociological Imagination” by C. Wright Mills, which was meant to be an aid to making the proper conections in the essay. In my essay my thesis statment was “History has shaped me, but if anything it has made me question myself, and my role in history.” The thesis according to my teacher was a decent one, not spectacular but it did its job. The problem with my essay- as with many of essays- was that I had a tendency to drift from the thesis. This tendency to drift from the thesis ussualy makes it difficult for the reader to keep up with the essay, or stay interested. This shows right away that one of the major ways I can improve-not only this essay but all future essays- is by bringing each paragraph back to the thesis. I also have a tendency to move my major points deeper into the paragraph rather than keep them in the middle or higher up, this also leads to the reader become dissinterested. Which would obviously have caused Mr. Fox to become dissinterested.

Something Ive started realizing that a lot of my essay’s major issues came in the form of organizational issues, rather than content. Especially when it came to where to put what in which part of my essay. In the rubric for John Fox’s essay, the essay is meant to be a very long 5 oage essay. The essay I did in ENglish based off that did not have the same oage requirements, however the structural requirements were meant be followed regardless. As I look over my essay and see what each paragraphs point is, it becomes increasingly clear that major points are being made however the order seems to be close to random. Mr. Fox specifically wanted us to use the first few paragraphs to focus on our own biography and build that up so we can dissassemble it and analyze it later on in tangent with the greater history. In my essay I have multiple paragraphs where I talk about my biography, however they aren’t all in the begining of my essay. This could easily be fixed by simply moving the paragraphs up

In his rubric Mr. Fox also talks about the deeper analysis he wanted done of our personal biographies, including the realtionships that were important to us, as well as experiences. In my essay however there are only 1-2 paragrpahs with little analysis of specific relationships and events. In fact when moving from my first body paragraph essay to the second one you can see my essay uses broader points and jumps right into histories connection to my life. I do go over some issues I had and how they changed me or shaped certain aspects of my life, however that was one paragraphs and it was closeer to the bottom of my essay which clearly shows how I could have structured my essay better. In the revision of the essay that my teacher did, he outlines how I strayed from the point and returned far too late near the end of the essay

Structural issues are fairly easy to fix, you simply have to move some words, or sentences, and sometimes whole paragrarhs. however my essay included issues that weren’t just on the structural side, as well as basic grammar and writing side. In my essay’s I have been having a lot of trouble with sentence structure, especially when it comes to run on sentences, and sentence fragments. This makes reading my essay much more difficult, becuse when a reader reads it is not a monotonous dull experience with a constant pace, it is more of a rythm with which readers use to read. When sentences are written in fragments that should be connected better to other sentences, it causes a break in the rythm and forces the reader to go back and re-read the sentence. This is not only asthetically unpleasant to the reader but it if its done multiple times can really make the reader miserable. Eventually what happens is the reader begins to become dissinterested because the sentence structure issues are taking away from the content of the essay. This would propbably anoy John Fox a lot and would probably cause him to grade my essay lower simply because the issues over took the content and my ideas.

A long with sentence structure, I can do better with the PIE, which has to do with how a paragraph is setup so you can state the Point, then deliver some Information, eventually this leads to you Explanation and you then have a structured essay.

In conclusion, we can all impove in school and thats the whole reason for going to school. I can clearly improve my Essay writing skills this quartter by giving the essay a lot more structure. Also I plan to work on my sentence structure skills, so my essay’s have more than just ideaological depth but competent sentences to help convey those ideas much better than I do now. The most important thing I thing I can do to help make my essay better is stick to the point, and to bring my points around, or how my english teacher puts it “going full circle”. This way, both John Fox and any teachers I have later on will be able to appreciate my essay’s more.