Reflective Essay for Chapbook

English 323

To help you assess your own progress this term, and to help you (and others like you) think about the job of being a writer, you'll include in your chapbook a short, a roughly 3-page double-spaced essay about your "writer's identity." This essay would probably best fit as the final item in your book.

Provide a good title for your essay. Examples:

"What Kind of Writer Am I?"

"Who Am I as a Writer?"

"A Semester of Writing, Fighting, and Sighing"

"How One Student Survived a Creative Writing Workshop"

The purpose of this assignment is to: 1) to help you absorb, understand, and evaluate what you've learned this term; 2) to help your instructor evaluate your progress; 3) to help you contemplate what it means to be "a writer"--casually or professionally--and a participant in contemporary fine arts. Try, if you can, to make the essay fit logically as a final item in your book.

Your specific audience for this essay is other beginning writers who are interested in what it means to write creatively, how one grows as a writer, and how a college course may affect one's identity as a writer.

Here are some questions you might consider responding to:

  1. How would you characterize yourself as a writer? What is your "writer's identity"?
  2. How has this course affected that identity?
  3. What did you write for this course?
  4. How many workshop sessions were held for discussion of your work?
  5. What feedback did you receive on your work during workshop sessions? How did you subsequently revise or rethink your material?
  6. How, generally as well as concretely, did you apply course content to your poems and/or stories? What specific class discussions, activities, reading assignments, and community events did you draw on to learn about what writers do?
  7. What would you say are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?
  8. Where do you see yourself headed as a writer?

 

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