Writing Goals

The Goals:

• I want to expand my vocabulary with 200 new words, more descriptive words.

• I want to write 5000 words of meaningful literature, outside of school.

• I want to give feedback to 3 different people

Goal 1: I want to expand my vocabulary with 200 new words, more descriptive words.

Why I Chose This Goal:

I choose this goal after finding myself constantly searching for synonyms for words and other descriptors throughout the first half of the semester. I felt that having this goal would push me to learn a variety of new words which would intern help to expand the purview of my vocabulary. With this amount of new words I anticipated my writing getting gradually more sophisticated.

I originally thought that learning 200 words would take a prolonged amount of time. I was mistaken in my assumption, in the first 3 days of recording new vocabulary words that I learned in my daily life (in other classes, at home, while reading), I had recorded over 274 new words, this was resultant to one of my reading goals of reading a classical book, which accounted for over 87% of these new found words. Overall until June 20th, I had recorded over 4065 words, which can all be found in my daily learning tracker.

Progress:

Impact:

The impact that this goal has made on my writing has been very efficacious. As I anticipated, my writing has progressively grown in meaning and sophistication. Refer to 2 examples of my work before and after putting this goal into effect and you will observe very noticeable differences between the 2, not only in sophistication but also in the depth of the message that I was striving for. Ultimately, this goal has allowed me to express myself more clearly and precisely in both my writing and speaking.

Goal 2: I want to write 5000 words of meaningful literature, outside of school.

Why I Chose This Goal:

I decided on this objective because I wanted to push myself to write for reasons other than schoolwork. I would have the chance to explore my own thoughts, feelings, and creativity in a way that befits who I am by writing 5,000 words of significant literature. This goal also allowed me to practice writing and develop my skills.

After I has started trying to make progress on this goal I felt that I didn't have anything I wanted to write about. That was until I had started reading more. Then I suddenly had an opinion on the books I was reading. This is was what I felt passionate about writing about, book reviews. My first book review alone was composed of over 6043 words, available for all to view on good reads. After that review I wrote 34 more, similar in size, all available on my profile. Even after I published them I continually updated them when I had more to write about, for example after reading We Were Dreamers and publishing a review I further reflected on the message and the impact the book had on me, after 8 days I updated my review, adding the impact that the book had on my perspective of expectations and the role they play in society, both positive and negative effects.

Progress:

Impact:

Overall this goal has allowed me use sophisitaced writing in my daily life. Practicing my writing skills through my day, not just when I am required to has helped me to not only become a better writing but has also allowed me to use my skills to effectively convey my opinion on real word topics.

Goal 3: I want to give writing to 3 people for their writing.

Why I Chose This Goal:

I chose this goal because I noticed that in the first half of the term I was only receiving feedback, rarely giving it to others. That's why I chose to this goal, to not only help others with their work, but to also learn about different writing styles and use what I like in their writing in my own. I also anticipated that this goal would allow me to spot mistakes in other work that have also gone unnoticed in my own.

After the second half of the term began I immediately started scouting opourtinuitys, although none of the ones I identified interested me. Until finally my peer Kang was working on an assignment for our English class. He asked me to review his week 1 annotations after he glanced and was impressed with mine. I took the opportunity to give feedback and told him to avoid only using general statements about the characters that were being referred to but instead to use specific examples of the characters and the events that he was responding to. Over the course of the semester I have also helped to edit my friend Lambert's work as well as Issac's. All of the specific examples can be found in my daily learning tracker.

Progress:

Impact:

This goal has not only allowed me to help others make their writing stronger but I have been able to uncover hidden flaws in my own work, for example in one of the works I was reviewing, I saw a comma splice, there was a very similar error in my week 3 annotations. Apart from this I have seen significant improvement in the variety of tones that I write with depending on the assignment. Refer to my literary paragraph and my Book Bento oral response notes to see as difference in tone.