Research Paper Reflection

Overall: 
I felt overall for my paper that I did the best I could have in the time I had allowed for me and with the resources and knowledge I had known before the research paper. I feel though after seeing my paper and also thinking about it at times throughout the break what I could have done differently was try and find a perfect structure to my paper as I still feel, even after the paper, that the structure I chose for my paper could have been changed or improved to make it seem like a better and well written essay. I learned through this research paper process that it takes a long time and a lot of hard work to write a 14 page paper. When I was first given this assignment I honestly thought it was not going to be impossible like I had thought my freshman year when I was assigned a research paper. But looking back and remembering how I felt about the writing process for my research paper, I wish I had spent more time writing and perfecting my paper rather than trying to just get the paper or parts of the paper done on time. I should have definitely just written my paper ahead of time and left time for re-doing or editing my paper if I did not like how it looked or sounded. But now that the research paper is over, I feel quite relieved that all the stress from the research paper is gone. The only big writing assignments are not from two classes anymore but rather from one other class. Also, the other smaller writing assignments that are available for the rest of my English Junior year will allow me to grow more in my writing and improve more with the smaller assignments and use my mistakes from my research paper to help improve my smaller essays.
Strong Points: 
I felt that I did well with a majority of my sentence fluency and ideas in my essay. I also felt that I was able to not use as many to be verbs and my word choice was right on top for this essay. As I did not use any cliche or slang in this essay. I also did really well with the voice in my paper as it sounded sophisticated and mature as well as grammatically correct. I also felt that I did, overall, a good job with my content for my essay as I had all my ideas shown and written down and had packed a lot of information about each of my quotes and gave a fairly good analysis for a bunch of my quotes.
Improvements: 
The areas I could have improved on in this paper could be my organization as my teacher did mention that she still could not understand or comprehend some areas of my paper. She especially showed in the third chapter that it was much harder for her to understand logically what this chapter was about and that my sentences and overall chapter did not flow logically for her. I could have also improved in my MLA as I lost many smaller little points from MLA mistakes. I also could have written a better thesis and introductory sentences as they were either really broad or too narrow. Overall, I need to work on for my future essays with organization throughout my whole paper so it makes sense logically to others rather than just myself.
Advice: 
The advice I would give to next year's Juniors would be to not procrastinate or let the small mistakes go as you go through the process of writing this paper. After looking through my paper after not seeing it for two weeks, I noticed that a lot of my mistakes were little mistakes that cost me a lot of points and a couple of bigger mistakes, which I understand why cost me my other half of my points lost for this assignment. I would also suggest trying to get ahead with this project and allowing a lot of time in the end for lots of editing or rewriting as you only get a little bit of time after mid-winter break to fully write and edit your paper altogether. And from all of my advice, it seems fair to say that I definitely wished that I had given myself more time to edit and write my paper ahead of time so that I could work on my bigger areas of weakness for me and fix the smaller mistakes in the end. But this research paper is now done and all I can do is just learn from my mistakes and use these mistakes as a guide to not making the same mistakes again.

As this is my last post on this blog, I am now finally done.

Until Next Year,
Zain