Looking through past TOWs and seeing my improvement really shocks me, to a degree, because as the year went on, I didn’t really feel like my TOWs were getting a lot better, but now I can see that they were. In the beginning, there was no flow to my sentences, and it just really seemed like I was putting together the paragraph from a formula. As I went on throughout the year, my writing relaxed, and acquired flow, and it began to seem more like a coherent piece of writing instead of a formula that I was just putting words into. I think I mastered how to incorporate quotes, or ideas, from passages I read or pictures I analyzed because first I would just use big blocky quotes that interrupted the flow of the passage, but then I moved away from that and began breaking quotes up to get to the actually good information, using them to further my ideas, not having them be the main idea, and getting more out of them than I would have gotten in the beginning of the year. However, I'm still not perfect, as I could definitely stand to improve how I explain rhetoric devices. Throughout the year, I got better at identifying rhetorical devices, and began to see how they shaped passages and persuaded the reader to the author's side, but I still struggle with clearly articulating the effect they have on both what the author is trying to say and what the reader takes away from the article. I can see that in my last TOW, where I could have gone a lot farther in my analysis of the quote. I benefited from these TOWs because not only was I practicing my writing each and every week, I was also learning about the world through the articles I read and the images I analyzed. I even used something I had learned about from one of my TOWs on the AP test. While doing the TOWs weren't always my favorite, I think they were very useful in terms of gauging my progress throughout the year and showing how much my writing improved.
