In January, with the new year and school term, our class started a unit based around one question “What draws us to imaginary worlds?” We started off the unit by learning about Wonder. We studied how without wonder the world wouldn’t go around because it is wonder that sparks our curiosity and creativity. We then went on to learn about fantasy and how it is an appealing genre of book to read or movie to watch. We completed a couple of assignments on fantasy such as making a collage of our understanding of what is the appeal of fantasy.
Here is my collage:
After this, we started reading the novel Alice in Wonderland, which is a story about a girl’s imagination running free as she visits a fantasy world that she calls wonderland. Lewis Carroll writes the book from a child’s point of view bringing a real sense of wonder to the character in the book.
During the time we were reading Alice in Wonderland we also learned about essay structure and how to write a proper 5-paragraph essay with an introduction paragraph, three body paragraphs and a conclusion paragraph. As well, we learnt about mistakes a lot of people make when writing essays such as using I, we, you instead of readers, audience and people etc. On top of essay writing, we also learned how to integrate quotes from books, articles, websites etc. into writing a paragraph.
With everything we had learned, we were told we would be writing an essay in class answering one of two questions ” How does Carroll create a real imaginary world for his reader? or
How are readers/viewers drawn to imaginary world”? I chose the second question as I felt that it would give me more room to express my opinions and points for the essay. This was an in class essay so we weren’t allowed to write anything for the essay beforehand except for filling out this chart diagram to establish the points for each of our body paragraphs and within each paragraph.
Here is the diagram we were able to fill out:
During the class we had to write the essay on the question we chose. I felt somewhat prepared but was nervous as I am not a fast writer and cannot get all my ideas down super fast. When we got into class, it turned out we only had forty minutes for the entire essay: 10 minutes to prepare, 20 minutes to write and 10 min to edit. It was hard for me to finish my essay in this time period, so when class ended I had only written 3 out of the 5 paragraphs. I know I didn’t write my best work, as I had no time to edit my work.
Here is the first draft of the essay I wrote in the forty minutes:
After handing in the essay we were able to edit it for a final draft. I was happy I had the chance to edit it but when I look back on it I think I could have done a better job of correcting my work and resubmitting it.
Here is my final draft with critique from the teacher:
After looking at the critique that I was given and knowing I didn’t do my best work I decided I would take the feedback I received and correct it one last time for a final draft again even though we had already received our marks.
So here is my final draft after taking the feedback from my essay’s second draft and applying it to the final draft:
As you can see I changed a lot in the last paragraph, and took the feedback that was given to me. Even though I didn’t get the best mark and I know my first draft was not my best work, I feel that the improvements and difference between my first draft and final draft is a very big accomplishment improvement wise as I took what I did wrong and fixed the problems within the essay.