Reflection

“These questions can confuse many and maybe even there could be more questions that people have come up with. But kids are not understanding why it’s happening and how they can understand where it’s coming from, even perhaps how that is going to affect them in the future.”

AND

“ When I was 5, I went to an elementary school in Manhattan. It was called Ps6. I knew how to speak Spanish and English at the time. English was my first and Spanish was my second because my parents wanted to speak Spanish to us.”

TO

“Before the Graduation our teacher told us to make an essay or a list of things we wanted to achieve while we are now getting close to the end. I decided to write an essay about reading people. I went through a lot in high school.”

These sentences are quotes from my first drafts. The first one is my synthesis draft. It was a very ROUGH draft and I’m not lying to you. For that assignment I didn’t know what to write, I was so stuck on what topic is important to me and what I know I can connect to. Until I was able to find the topic I wanted to talk about. Now for the draft it wasn’t fully complete because I ran out of ideas entirely but the teacher said that it wasn’t clear about who my audience was. I’m the type of person that likes to talk to everyone, get to know everyone and where they stand. So I re-read it and I started to understand what the teacher was saying but that urgence of wanting this to go to everyone was challenging for me because I’m a kid and people can tell who writes and speaks like a kid. I put the writing in as if the audience is for kids but I also want adults and other ages to read it because I personally think that it doesn’t matter the age that you’re reading any book on, it matters about what you gain out of it. So if kids and adults gain something out of my writing then I think I have done something good. I have changed that piece into, “ These questions include the emotions of confusion, disconnection, dissociating with the family. All can lead to kids wanting to walk away or even wanting to know why it’s happening to them and maybe if it happens to anyone else in the world.” This shows that I changed it so that the audience is now towards kids which took me re-reading it 3 times to try to figure out how to do that. I going to start talking about the 2 sentences that are up there, “ when I was 5”. That was supposed to be used for my speech but I decided not to because I felt like it didn’t fit me at all. I’m emotionally involved and when I was 5 I barely had emotions so it didn’t fit my speech at all. My speech ended up talking about how once we left high school we had to move fast, it was hard for me and I was sure it was hard for many kids my age as well. I thought it would be better to talk about that then try to remember what happened when I was 5.  Kids are emotional, that’s how we connect with society so I was using that to my advantage. But i ended up just talking about my speech in a short term aspect because the main points are better than me reading the whole thing. But this part of my speech I think was the most impactful part for me because it means that for once I can be vulnerable in my writing, but the teacher wanted the speech to be about reading so I made it about reading people because reading people is part of life and its part of my life. It’s a type of reading that people never really think of and it can even be a type of language. “I decided to write an essay about reading people. I went through a lot in high school.” So in general the teacher helped a lot by making me re-read everything, make sure that every piece of my evidence coincides with each other and to make sure that my thesis is carried throughout the whole writing and lets not forget that to make sure that the audience needs to be clear.