My biggest issue when writing essays is that have always had trouble starting my essays. No matter how short or long, interesting or boring, or how little or a lot of time I have on my hands, I always struggle to get through my heading and introduction paragraph. However, weirdly enough, once I finally manage to get through my heading and introduction, I fly through my essay without any struggles. Not only that, but I am a huge procrastinator and struggle to find a time where I am “focused and prepared” enough to start my essays. However, throughout my writing journal I was able to figure out ways to avoid procrastination and get myself to focus on finishing my introduction paragraph more effectively. 

        With my first writing assignment, literacy narrative essay, I really enjoyed writing this essay and had no struggles writing this. I believe the reasons were because the essay was based off an interesting topic and that the beginning of my semester was less hectic. When I started my semester, I was nervous about the workload that I anticipated. I remember starting this essay and working on it as soon as we were assigned to it. I believe a part of my motivation and drive to write essays is mainly driven off the pressure I had of college and its expectation. Overall, I really enjoyed writing this essay regardless because I was able to write about a topic of myself and my background which was obviously something not that hard to do. This essay also did not require us to cite in MLA format which was a part of a reason why this essay wasn’t as difficult to finish writing. 

        My expository essay was an essay I believe I evolved the most with my writing because it required a lot of informative information and compared to my first essay, it was much different from each other. This essay not only required an MLA format, but I feel like it needed to sound more professional and proper compared to the literacy narrative essay where I just wrote about myself and experience with writing. However, I also did enjoy writing a lot about this essay because I’ve chosen a topic that I was very familiar with and knew a lot about beforehand. During this time, I also had a speech presentation to do in which I was also able to pick and choose the topic I can work on. This was very helpful because I already have done the extra research needed for both assignments. Therefore, although I feel like this was the hardest assignment, my knowledge on this essay topic helped me tremendously. I believe this essay took me less than 2 hours to finish which was surprisingly not as long as I expect it would take me because of how difficult I assumed it would be. Being that this was the first essay out of this class that was MLA formatted, I’ve learned a lot more about MLA formatting and was able to do my next essay with no issues. The feedback I got back from this essay on the MLA formatting is what helped me learned the most. 

      My argumentative essay was the most difficult essay to start because I had a really hard time trying to get past by introduction paragraph although it shouldn’t have been that difficult to finish because I did a persuasive speech presentation on the same topic. However, one way I learned to help push myself to focus and get myself to start my essays was having someone near me to keep me from being distracted. On many certain occasions, I would either have my roommates sitting next to me writing essays as well or I would have a friend of mine on facetime. This was one specific way that encouraged me to stay focus and continue writing my essays even when my procrastination has been getting the best of me.

     Overall, I really enjoyed writing all these essays mainly because we were able to choose our essay topic. I was able to find a way to solve my issue with starting essays and staying focus through trial and error. I tried making a to do list to help me get started on my essays and breaking up my essays into parts however that didn’t really help me as much as I hope it did. I think I evolved in my writing in ways not necessarily for the writing itself but for the way I was able to find a specific technique in getting myself focused and less distracted/unmotivated.