Writing an essay is no easy task and was possibly one of the hardest things that I have done when it comes to writing in the last few years. While writing a blog post gives me time to take breaks think about what I’m doing and come back and revise it the next day writing an essay doesn’t give me any of those options, well apart from the last one but I’ll get to that in a bit.

When we were reading our books and planning our trip to go meet author and politician Wab Kinew in September I was very intimidated when I was told I would be writing an essay as the final part of our “how do authors use text to teach us about ourselves?” project. However I put my thoughts on how good I would actually be at writing the essay aside while I read two books, took a field trip and made a movie trailer. All of the links to said activity’s if I have a post about them are linked alongside them. Eventually (like all of the work I put off till later) the due date arrived, however I wasn’t completely unprepared to sit down and start writing as a week before we went through all of the key essentials. 

Writing the essay was a decently stressful experience, I didn’t bring in any notes or quotes instead I only had my outline with my main three points that I was going to make into my main three support paragraphs. The topic of the essay was the same as the driving question for our coarse “how do authors use text to teach us about ourselves?”. I decided I would answer the question by saying that I believe authors use characters in their stories to teach us as characters are relatable and make taking in an authors core message easy.

While I thought it went really well while I was writing it as I read it over 5 times before finally submitting it after 75 minutes, after I got it back after the weekend I saw that my results weren’t actually that good. I made the big mistake of having incorrect indenting at the start of each paragraph as well as grammatical errors and run on sentences all over the place. I have time to revise the essay and I have been fixing everything after getting peer and teacher critique. This was a bit of an eye opener as I didn’t know that I had messed up that much in my essay and so I think I have a bit to work on when it comes to proofreading my work.

While it wasn’t the perfect first essay, I wouldn’t say that it was bad and it gives me a few things to work on and I feel more prepared for next time.