Reflection on Scarlet-Crucible and Semester 1 Final Essay

The very first thing I noticed about these essays was that my handwritten essays are significantly shorter than my essays which start their life out typed. Perhaps this is because I have the ability to add elaborations in later on things, but I think it’s most significantly because my handwriting is big, I write slower than I can type, and I focus too much on writing “enough.” For the first draft, I think both of these essays could have benefitted from more time thinking about how the essay was organized and laid out. The connections between the sections weren’t always as strong as I feel they should have been, and it’s very difficult to improve that later without rewriting the entire essay from scratch. I think I can improve the structure of my essays by simply reading essays that are written by more competent and enthusiastic essayists.

For the Semester Final essay, I feel that it very strong work for me already in draft form, so the majority of my revision went into improving the wording in a way that’s rather difficult to do when you’re writing it on paper. For instance, I restructured the first sentence to be more understandable. The draft version contains “to others,” in a context where I don’t actually appear to be comparing anyone’s opinions, and so that was removed. I also reordered some of the clauses in the sentence to read more fluently. In addition to general readability improvements in the Final essay, I had many small single word improvements, doing things like adding “ideal” at the end of the first paragraph to emphasize that it is a theoretical society rather than the society that Thoreau lived in, since later on I use constructs like “Hester’s Society” to refer to the society that she lives in.

For “The Responsibility of Redemption in The Crucible and The Scarlet Letter,” I mostly added more evidence in places that needed it, since I had plenty of time to polish the wording in the first draft. (That’s not to say that I didn’t improve the wording anywhere, it just wasn’t as commonly necessary.) In the second paragraph where I describe Hester being released from her obligation to Chillingworth, I added a description of how he basically just rejects her, strengthening the viewpoint that she doesn’t feel guilty towards him anymore. He doesn’t want her anymore. Also significantly, I added the emphasis that was almost entirely lacking about Dimmesdale’s confession at the end of the fourth paragraph, describing how he is suddenly energetic and about how acute his suffering was for 7 years. Plus, the awesome quote: “with a flush of triumph in his face, as one who, in the crisis of acutest pain, had won a victory.”

For the Final paper, even though I didn’t use the very best organization, I’m still pretty proud of how coherent it is, especially for a paper that was written on the spot with a relatively limited note card. I also use lots of strong quotes in this paper, and I think I tie them in really well, so that’s the best part of this essay. For the Scarlet-Crucible paper I’m most proud of how I juggle several different threads of topics. I’m explaining how a central topic relates to three separate characters in two separate books, and I manage to keep the points that I’m making about them all relatively coherently tied together. It also sounds like a fancy pants essay at many parts, which might not be a good thing in general (although it’s probably good for ACT writing scores), but I still really like it.

One new thing I’ve learned about my writing is that I should stop using so many freaking em-dashes! Looking back at the first paper it’s frankly a bit ridiculous. I’ve gotten much better about knowing where to put them, so future papers shouldn’t apply them quite as radically — I still like them too much though.

Finally, one thing that I distinctly remember from the process on the Scarlet-Crucible essay was that I left off the locations of my quotes while I was gathering evidence, so I didn’t actually have the in-text citations added until after I finished. I had to do a second pass over my paper looking at all the quotes, finding them in the book, and then adding the in-text citations. In the future, I need to remember to start on the citations early — this isn’t just for English papers either, I frequently wait to fix up the in-text citations on other papers, and I need to get better at that.