This paper received the most attention from me and is, in my opinion, my best major paper of the three. It goes beyond the product itself. I’m taking into consideration how my work made me feel in the end—after completing and turning it in, immediately after finding out my grade, and months later. Being the first major assignment of the course, it caused me a lot of anxiety and a reinforced perfectionist mindset. I didn’t know how harshly major papers were to be graded but knew they were significant grades, so I wanted to make sure my final draft was at a level of which even I—someone who extremely hard on herself, especially when it comes to writing—was satisfied with.

My process consisted of going over my essay a plethora of times. It shows greatly when comparing the final draft to my very first draft. This essay has undoubtedly been one of the most edited and cared-for essays that I have turned in, in general. What can I say, it was my baby. There was a significant connection that I was able to build with the prompt. Having struggled so much with literacy upon moving countries at a relatively young age, the prompt forced me (in a good way) to look back at my past and put together the pieces of what made me into the writer that I am today.

Upon editing and revising, my primary strategy was reading over it out loud a multitude of times to assure that it flowed well and made sense. Whenever I ran into a word that sounded off or seemed like it took away value from a sentence, I would either replace the word with a synonym or rephrase the sentence altogether. I took everyone's feedback into consideration--this includes my peer group, Prof. Gillespie, the student who helped me at the UCF Writing Center, and my brother. Taken that I had decided to write in my mother tongue in this essay, that of which made it sound as casual as everything on this website sounds, I believed I genuinely needed as many eyes and brains and possible for feedback. As a result, however, this assignment felt as though it was a make it or break it situation.

As previously mentioned, this was my first experience of writing an academic essay in my natural thought process. I didn’t try to sound fancy, professional, mechanical, or whatever other terms that may apply. My first discussion post in this course reflects my past tendency to try to sound like more of an intellectual and formal. Before taking this class, I would’ve never dared to use contractions in academic writing. I felt as though I was breaking some untold law, which I actually mentioned in this major paper.

This essay symbolized, for me, a statement of the writer that I am. This first essay is the one I am most proud of, like I said, not just because of how well it was written and handled, but primarily because this essay set me free from prioritizing formality.