Personal Essay Portfolio Page Essay

Austin Coven

Through the writing of my personal essay, I have become educated on many useful

writing strategies and steps which I will employ with the writing of my college essay. No step is

more important than the others, similar to a food recipe: you can’t have one thing without

utilizing the others to make a scrumptious end result. For each of the topics listed in the chart, I

have obtained essential knowledge on how to successfully write my college essay by going step

by step through the lengthy process of skillfully writing, ultimately leading to a masterful finished

product.

For the first topic, voice in writing, Janet Burroway writes “voice” by explaining how to

convey voice through using diction and syntax to help guide the way. By using a variety of

interesting/unique word choices and structuring sentences in a way that is personal to the writer,

the writer makes themselves distinct from the rest.

The next topic that helped to improve my writing was expressive writing, which is the

telling. This useful tactic portrays the thoughts and feelings of the writer and explains ultimately

what happened in one’s narrative. In my essay, I had to tell the reader about my encounters

with the rain and how it has shaped me into the curious and spontaneous person I am today.

Next we have reflective writing, which goes hand in hand with expressive writing. This

topic explains how the expressive writing changed or impacted you or made a difference for

you. In my essay, the reflective writing is the fact that the rain makes me curious about life and

complex with my style of thought.

Personally, pre-writing was the most impactful topic of all. For pre-writing, I wrote

everything that came to my mind by free writing, which really put forth my most creative ideas
due to the fact that they were so unfiltered and I was not becoming overly conscious with

grammar mistakes. This technique really helped me in the writing of my essay because I wasn’t

thinking about how good my essay was going to sound, but rather, I wrote my thoughts freely

and in a way that was more distinct to my voice.

Drafting was another crucial addition to my essay that allowed for a smoother flow

throughout the work and a more sophisticated undertone. By using Visual Thesaurus, I used

less of the words in my essay that were used repetitively and ultimately used more of a variety

of words. I got the draft done over the weekend while simply editing my free writing because I

didn’t want my essay to lose its sense of voice through my unfiltered experiences in an attempt

to make myself sound more intelligent.

The next step/topic was revising. My first step of revision was reading the costco essay.

This essay made me realize that my essay needs deeper meaning and a stronger example of

hooptedoodle. The essay also motivated me to challenge myself to dig deeper to leave an

impact on the reader just as the costco essay left a remarkable impact on me. I next used

Vocabgrabber in order to add variety to my word choice in sentences once again. I definitely will

use this valuable resource sometime soon in the future to avoid repetition in my essays. Lastly, I

read my essay back to check for sentences that sounded off and then tried to replace them with

a smoother alternative.

Editing is also a crucial topic of the essay writing process. Through editing my essay, I

found many mistakes that I originally didn’t think I made due to how hard they are to catch such

as repeating a word twice by accident or forgetting a comma where one should be placed. I

found it very helpful to physically print my paper out and read it back for errors because, after

all, that is how someone else will read it. Printing my essay out allowed me to catch many errors

that I previously did not catch.

 Lastly, there was publishing. Although I am not sending this piece to college, I am very

proud of the end result. I feel as if this essay is a step beyond anything else I have written with

regards to my creativity. I used various literary techniques such as allusion and hyperbole that

would normally be outside of my comfort sun. I think the reader will really enjoy my essay for its

unique take on such a usual occurrence.

Clearly, all of the following steps/topics were equally as important for the development of

my essay. If colleges were to see this essay, I would have no doubt in my mind that they would

share the same appreciation for my work that I do. However, getting to this final result was not

easy.However, by taking the topics listed above into serious consideration, this process proved

to become much less of a challenge and more of a valuable experience.