Archive of ‘English 11’ category

Where I’m From Essay

The Writing Process

I enjoyed all the steps throughout this process, some more than others , but I enjoyed them all nonetheless. My favourite part of the process was conducting the interview with my Opa since it was interesting to sit down with him and talk about stories that I would not have known otherwise. It didn’t feel like an interview, it felt more as though I was just chatting with my Opa and sharing stories and experiences, which made it easier to find an interesting enough story to write about. I learned a lot about how to ask the right questions to receive the answers I was trying to find, for example I learned that asking well worded open ended questions elicit a much more thorough response than a simple close ended one. The last thing that I really enjoyed throughout this process was the peer editing portion. It was very helpful to have my peers give their suggestions and it helped me find mistakes or parts I could improve on that I would not have seen otherwise. I like having feedback on my work in general but my peer editors gave exceptional feedback that was detailed and really did help me improve my essay quite a bit. Writing this essay was a bit of a new experience, especially the interview part, so it was a bit awkward at first but by the time I had my final draft I realized that I enjoyed all the fun parts, and I didn’t mind the not as fun ones too much either!

Core Competency Reflection

Evidence that I can acquire information about complex and specialized topics from various sources, synthesize it, and present it with thoughtful analysis can be found in… I proved that I can demonstrate this competency through my collection of information from my interviews, using that information to write a proper essay, and present the final product containing all of the relevant information verbally to the class.

I show that I value feedback from others in my group by… During the peer reviews I was given lots of feedback, which I took into account and added parts that may have been missing and followed advice about how to improve my essay further.

I can contribute to and work with criteria to improve my own work; evidence of that is… I demonstrated that I can follow and work with criteria because I had to rewrite portions of my original draft to make sure that it had all of the points necessary. After my work was reviewed by my peers I compared their suggestions with the criteria and added parts that would improve the final product and check off all of the criteria.

An example of something I have spent a lot of time learning about is… I spent a long while talking to my Opa to hear his stories and asked him to clarify when I wasn’t sure of a detail. This ended up taking quite a long time and I had many recordings of different interviews that I took to go in depth about the stories he told me.

My Paper