In general, I am a deep person. I think a lot—I overthink a lot. Sometimes I think so much that it all just explodes and my brain explodes and I don’t know how to say or write what I’m thinking. Sometimes I get so frustrated because I can’t ever possibly get out all the things I’m thinking and feeling by just using mere words. Sometimes I just want to scream at the top of my lungs until it goes away. In Language Arts class, we get to write journal entries and we did last year too. Some of my entries required a lot of thought and personal reflection.  A lot of them last year and not as much this year I’ve seemed to just ramble a lot and not be able to get out what I wanted to say because it couldn’t be described in words.

This year in Language Arts, we did a project called the “This I Believe” essay. Doing that project really helped me organize some of the thoughts I was having. I have become a lot better at getting my thoughts out and organizing them into writing. I tried different strategies and took all of my thoughts one at a time and started writing everything I felt was relevant to the story just to get a basic concept of the writing. This really helped me grow in the writing content in Language Arts this year.

Like I said, I used some strategies and one of them was outlining the structure of the writing before I started actually writing it. This was at the beginning of the project after we'd learned about what the project really was and how other people had done it in the past. It was also after we explored the difference between personal essay writing, personal narrative writing and transactive writing. We were trying to write personal essays which usually tell the importance of something that is very significant to the author through stories of how that significance came about. They don't usually tell in depth stories and explain why that story means something to them, which is something personal narratives usually include. Transactive writing however is a completely different writing style that has nothing to do with any personal topics or tones. This type of writing is trying to convince or persuade your opinion about something using facts and information. When I looked at the outline I had, I thought about how to actually write the essay and what to say and how to express my emotions. I knew all I could do was start writing, so I did and as I went I looked at my outline to make sure I was following some sort of map so that my brain wouldn't explode. In the end I think that really helped my essay. The main purpose of the "This I Believe" project was to find something that we believe that makes us who we are and that we hold dear to us, and prove how we came to believe this through stories and past experiences we've had. This was a very expressive project which is sometimes hard for me, but having an outline and extracting one thought at a time really helped me.

Something else that helped me was doing a brainstorm just before we began writing. This brainstorm took up a few pages in my notebook because I really thought about it and I wanted all of my thoughts to be down first so that I could try and organize them later. In looking at my brainstorm, you can see that I was answering questions, those questions came from my teacher who wrote them on the board in class to really help the clarity of everyone's thoughts and get all of their ideas down. Clarity of thought is how clear and comprehendible something you thought about and are trying to convey is.

Some of the questions on my brainstorm that really helped me were "How do you know your beliefs are true" and "why is your belief significant to you" because they made me  think specifically about what exactly I believe and how I can talk about its importance and significance in my life. You can see I wrote a lot in the support column. This was where we put evidence that supported our beliefs and I had a lot to say here because I started thinking in individual thoughts and put them all down. Then when you look at my final essay, you can see how the clarity of my thought was much better and my ideas were organized, which, I had never been able to do before.

I feel good that I've been able to grow in my ability to logically write out how I feel about something. This was a good skill for me to learn now because it has really made a difference in the way I feel, even just talking about things I think and believe without writing them. I am also happy and grateful that I have bettered this skill because I think in the future I will use it a lot. In school, at STEM there will probably be more in depth thinking projects later and having this skill will be extremely useful because it can earn me good grades which are really important to me. Also in my personal future, I know I will be writing a lot of stories because writing is something I really enjoy and being able to organize thought into writing will be very beneficial.