TOW #28 - Reflection

Throughout the year, I have seen growth within myself as a writer, and TOWs have helped me to develop this change. At the beginning of the year, my TOWs did not have the flow that they eventually developed. Without even reading my essays and just thinking about the way I wrote, it seemed that as time went on the words came more easily and my essays were written much more smoothly as one idea flowed into the next. I think that I mastered creating a strong thesis and proving said thesis in my TOWs. It became much easier to crank out a well written thesis with a claim, context, and consequence. However, there is always room for improvement. I should have varied the rhetorical devices that I referenced in each TOW; I did not really strive to learn new devices and incorporate them into my writing, but instead I just used the same 10 devices over and over. I believe that the TOWs helped us prepare for the exam because we were able to crank out ideas into well written sentences quickly. However, on the actual AP exam there is no 350 word short answer, it is simply a full analysis essay. This is where TOWs fall short: the length of the essay does not help us prepare for the AP exam. Overall, TOWs are a someone helpful tool because they teach a student to organize their ideas quickly and accurately, but not necessarily in the quantity necessary for the exam in May.