April 25 Journal Entry

So, today after school I looked through some essay prompts and wrote two different essays to practice for the exam. It's what I struggle with the most- writing essays under pressure. One thing I did find is that I do much better if I take the time to do a pre-write before writing the essay. I never took the time to do one before because I was already stressed about having the time to write the essay on it's own. But, I took five minutes for the prewrite, and it helped me gather my thoughts, stay on topic, and I was able to get my ideas into the essay way quicker. I'm just starting to get better at writing essays of decent length in a specific amount of time, and now I need to work on writing quality essays, and to do that, I need to get out of the habit of just giving plot summaries. They warn you at the end of every prompt to avoid plot-summary, but I never seem to be able to provide enough textual evidence or examples of literary techniques in my essays. Personally, I think my inability to do that comes from my inability to analyze a piece of literature to begin with. I've never been good at it, and I'm not sure how to get better at it. -.-'