Although I have complained throughout the school year that I hated doing TOWs every single Sunday, which I will now be forced to say about Tuesdays, I will admit that I did benefit from my weekly works at the end of the day. At first, I thought that the TOWs were going to be a serious assignment that would be graded harshly, but then I learned that that was untrue. As a result, the TOWs simply became a tedious exercise that I felt did not help me at all in the AP English. They weren’t being graded, they weren’t being critiqued, and they were never looked at in class. Therefore, they seemed to be a waste of time. However, I did want to improve my writing so there were times when I had a free schedule where I put more effort into my responses. Looking back at those TOWs, I can see how the influence of the course shaped those particular works to be better than the rest. However, it was really the grading that forced me to work harder and truly benefit from the assignment. When I knew that I was getting points for my TOWs, I worked especially hard to complete them with a higher standard, even the ones that I was pretty sure weren’t going to be graded. Just the threat of having my class grade dip caused me to apply what I had learned in class in order to make my writing better. As a result, of my distaste for the TOW assignments, the desire to do better, and threat of grading, my TOWs changed throughout the year.
Looking back through my TOWs there were a few noticeable changes, all of which are positive. However, nothing has been mastered and everything can still be improved upon because there is always room for improvement. The first aspect of my writing that I noticed had changed was the organization. Back in September, I had a simple structure for opening my TOWs, I would maybe give a sentence or two of background information and then talk about the credibility of the author or open the other way around. I would then answer most of my assigned points in the next few sentences just to get them out of the way. Then, the rhetorical devices used by the author(s) would get analyzed. This same structure continued on for months and has even continued until this very month. However, I now might add a few extra sentences and space the assigned points out so that the TOWs seem less rushed and more coherent. Coherency is the next aspect of my writing that I noticed had changed over the duration of the year. At the beginning of the year, it seemed as if I was just stringing random sentences together that had little to no connection(s). There were minimal transitions which caused my TOWs to seem as if I was just listing pieces of a summary instead of analyzing evidence for rhetorical devices. Now, I use more transitions and evidence to prove my points, causing my writing to be elevated to a higher level. Besides more evidence and coherency, my writing would not be elevated if my introductions and conclusions didn’t improve somewhat. Although neither my introductions or conclusions are perfect, they have definitely gotten better since the beginning of the year. My introductions now sound more profound and my conclusions are usually at least two sentences in length instead of one. However, if they are only one, it’s because my evidence has improved so much that I couldn’t write more without going over the word limit. Anyway, the one aspect of my writing that I noticed has not really progressed is my thesis statement(s). For the majority of my thesis statements, the structure generally stayed the same and never improved. Out of everything that I still need to work on, my thesis statements are my number one priority.
In conclusion, I feel as though my TOWs may not necessarily reflect how much my writing has grown as a result of AP English, but they did help me reflect on my strengths and weaknesses. The reflection that was caused by looking over my TOWs helped me constantly readjust inside of the classroom in order to better succeed. Therefore, even though I don’t really like writing TOWs, I will admit that they were very beneficial to me.
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