Rachel Woodroof

Essay- the very word can make any student cringe. This I Believe essay project changed my mind about essays.  This project was where we wrote a narrative essay on one of our personal core beliefs. At first, I wasn’t that excited. I mean when it was first mentioned in class, my spirits died as soon as I heard the word essay. It proved me wrong; I actually ended up enjoying it. I never expected to learn so much about myself through writing an essay because it took so much thought to find a core belief that I would never turn my back on or grow out of. I think this was the purpose of this project, to dig deep in ourselves, find something in our feelings, pull it out, re-visit it and learn something about ourselves we didn’t know before. This is the reason why I feel I have grown the most in self-reflection this year.

 

As usual, we didn’t go into this project fighting blind. We had weeks of preparation before our final revision and plenty of time to brainstorm and stare into space as we searched our minds for that core belief. We also went over how we should write our essays, and we learned lots of different content. One thing that I had never heard of before was transactive writing.  I learned that my essay shouldn’t try to persuade the reader to agree with my belief. If they did it would become transactive. One of my artifacts I used to prepare for the final was the official This I Believe brainstorm. This helped me figure out what core belief would be the best to use. It asked questions about our beliefs like: what lead you to discover your belief, how could it help others, what if other people don’t believe what you do and how do you know it’s true. The thing is, I don’t know if it’s true and other people don’t have to believe it the only thing that matters is that I do. These really helped me because it asked me questions I would want to focus on when writing the essay. It basically made me dissect my belief until I saw all of it inside and out. This didn’t only help me view it in all angles but also gave me a great way to organize my thoughts.

 

After I did the all the figuring and perfecting on my core belief, it was time to begin tying in my personal story. This was my final and I had to make it blend in with my belief.  I had a story in mind so I began to write it, but as I did I realized that my belief and story don’t really relate well. I also noticed that my brainstorm and my belief didn’t go well with each other either. I realized had been writing everything about a different core belief I didn’t even know I had. I found out that I strongly believe in the kindness of strangers and that people really do care about others. Once I was done with my essay, we got to record ourselves reading it and this is my second artifact. This was my favorite part. We used an app called Audacity that allowed us to just press the record button, and read aloud our essay.

 

In the future, I feel I could use this experience and content I learned through this process to help me if I ever wanted to be an author. There are lots of things that I want to be when I grow up. I have considered so many different options that I feel by investigating and learning more and more about each thing it can help me narrow it down to the things that I truly want to be. If being an author is one of them, this experience will be one I can come back to every time. Everything here that I have said is proof of how much I have grown in my ability to self-reflect personally and look back on myself now and my past, but I don’t want to regret the choices I’ve made. I want to be able to look back at them and learn from my mistakes.