How Catalfano Influenced Me

I strongly believe that each and every one of my written works this year improved as the semester went on, and I have become a better writer since I began. Each and every one of my peer editors, as well as Mr. Catalfano, has influenced me, and aided me in making my writing have a more mature tone to it. By each of them taking the time to critique my works then, whether I am revising for my final draft, or preparing for another essay, I take each and every one of their comments into account to make my writing better. I also believe that I started to use more mature vocabulary, in my essays, as the semester went on. For example, in my description essay I used words such as crispy, gooey, and trickles to portray a pine tree and maple syrup
I like to use my creativity skills when writing so whenever I would write my essays I would try and use the most creative way to portray the words needed to answer the essay question. In my memoir, I wrote about the time I experienced having Lyme Meningitis, and let me tell you…it was not a fun time. “The pain I experienced of the razor sharp needle piercing through my skin sent a sensation of a hundred tiny bee’s stinging me and it lasted hours.” That is an excerpt from my essay that I feel like I did a well executed job of really going deep into describing a moment, and going well beyond the plain, old boring
Aside from the fact that my commas are a big grammar issue of mine, I did use a lot of adverbs, especially in my descriptive essay to delicately portray the scene of my essay. “The badminton net that sits in my yard patiently yearns for a chance to get played.” By using the word patiently, I was able to really show, using personification, how badly the net wanted to be “played.” Overall, just learning about all of the grammar rules and such has made me be more cautious when writing my essays to avoid things such as sentence fragments, and unnecessary commas. Here is a fragment from my “The Real” essay that I did not catch until after it was graded ; “Usually posting pictures of her Passion Tea Lemonade, or Frappacinnos, on her snapchat story or of course Instagram.” Now I know the difference between true sentences and fragments since I learned that in a grammar lesson.

Our vocabulary studies this year have forced me to use more mature words and refrain from boring, lame words. I may have only used 1 to 2 actual vocabulary words from our books, such as in my persuasive essay the phrase “a small, bucolic town with all the resources you need”, contains the vocabulary word, bucolic, meaning a rural area. Studying more complex words overall has helped me stay away from words such as big, nice, happy, and use more word such as massive, gratifying,