Write an essay of approximately three pages describing some of your writing experiences in the past and explaining specifically how you want to grow as a writer. Consider this in terms of both the products you want to create and the process and mindset you’d like to have with respect to writing.

Throughout this unit, you will also write several brief reflections to help you think through your writing experiences, habits, and beliefs. For this assignment, though, you’ll write something more “essay-like.” Your reflections are primarily a way of helping you uncover your own ideas for yourself; an essay is about investigating ideas for yourself AND sharing it with an audience. How does that change the way you will write? That means you will need to be intentional about...

Focusing on a unifying idea. Reflections can be all over the place and don't necessarily need to fit together. You might even contradict yourself sometimes. In an essay, your readers will likely connect with what you are saying if you have a unifying idea that guides your writing. You can choose the most important point you want to make and then make sure that the rest of your writing connects to that idea in some way.
Organizing your ideas. In a reflection you might jump from one topic to the next and back again, and you might not pay much attention to when you begin and end a paragraph. That works fine in reflections--in fact it's good because it helps you to get all your ideas out without second guessing yourself, but when you are thinking about a reader, you will want to make choices about which ideas fit best together and how one idea might lead into the next.
Creating a sense of beginning and ending to the essay. Reflections begin with whatever your first thought is and end when you run out of ideas (or maybe when you reach the word limit). As you write the essay, think about how you might begin your writing by engaging your reader with the issues you are writing about. When you end the essay, perhaps you will want to reflect on why the ideas in the essay matter.
Revising what you write. In a reflection, it's OK to just write it all out and then hit submit. In an essay, you will need to take some time to read over what you have written and think about where the writing might be made clearer or more powerful for your reader.

As you write this essay, notice your process, your strengths, and your struggles, and use those to help guide what you say. It's fine to use any prior knowledge you have about writing essays, but don't let what your seventh grade teacher drilled into your head stress you out. The point of this essay is to experiment with how you put your ideas together for your audience. Your growth in that process is even more important than fitting into some mold of an essay.