Working on my Personal Essay

Today in class we continued doing our open critics about each other personal stories. My class has very creative minds. Evan story was about species racing in the galaxy, Shannon story was about Russians and I really liked her story because she made the story more vivid with sensory details. I also liked that she use Russians words making it more descriptive.  Lisa story was about a teenager girl who is in love with her best friend that is a girl. Her best friends found about her crush on her, she rejected her, cusses her out. The girl also doesn't like her nationality, Chinese. Her parents have a restaurant; she hates the place and her parents.

I found out that doing revision on story is very hard because you have to pay close attention to the text and what is the meaning/purpose of the story. While doing a revision you have to ask yourself, what are his strengths, what are his weaknesses, what can make this story a better story, is the pacing of the story good, is he giving out too much or to little information to the reader, is he being descriptive enough, does the POV makes sense and etc… There’s a lot of question you need to ask to yourself while doing a revision.

Then Achy let us out to take a big break from revision because our minds were tired. I went to get lunch at the Dining Hall. After I was done eating, I went to my room to work on my opposite of me story because it was due today at four in the afternoon.  I was almost done, but I needed to go to class already. When I got to class we started doing the three of the story that we had left to revise.  We were all completely tired. The critics didn't go as good as in the morning, I think we all tired and forgot about the stories that we didn't have any opinions to give. When we were done with the rest of the stories, Achy gave us the following work that we have for the rest of the week. First, is for the people who had their stories workshop today have 24 hours to turn it in. The reviewers need to write a summary about the story that they had to review. Pick a three minutes reading to present on Thursday. Write about what your grade should be for the class. We also did the evaluation on the class online, if you don’t do that you won’t be able to see your grade until September 23.

After that I came to my room to finish working on my opposite story. When I was done with the story, I emailed it to Achy. Then, I started working on my personal story. I did a strategy that worked for me. It was that I copy and paste two paragraphs from the story and focus on those two paragraphs first, that’s how I kept working on my story.

I needed to go meet up with Pamela at the International House. We talked about my day in class and how I felt being the center of attention for the critics. I really liked it, I mean is not that bad I appreciate everyone who gave me a comment about my story because is my last week and I want to make this story the best as possible as I could. She also went through the sentences assignment that she left me last night. I was impressed that I didn't have a lot of errors, only three of them. That made me feel comfortable about myself that I am soaking everything that she had taught me. I only need to keep on practicing every day to get use to the past tense verbs, regular and irregular.  Pamela also gave me a sheets of papers that would help me developed my vocabulary. That was one of the first thing I asked from her. Today I didn't have a lot of time to work on it, but if I do have the chance tomorrow I will.

I went to dinner at the Dining Hall where I saw Alexa, Oyin, and Vicky. Alexa, Vicky and I were talking about that we only have three more day and we go back home. Oyin asked if we were going to see each other again when we back home. Joking around, I told her that I had enough of her these past four weeks. But, she knew that I was just playing around with her. I didn't have a lot of time to hang around with them because I needed to keep working on personal story. 

I stayed in my room the whole time, until I was done with my personal essay and went to sleep.