Here is my Artifact Essay Reflection:

During the writing of my artifact essay, I learned a lot about my goals for writing, the essay-writing process, and my inspirations for writing the essay.

The writing experience for my essay was not bad, as I paced myself when writing. I started the writing process by regurgitating my thoughts. Then, I edited it down to a draft. This draft would be the first of many. I then organized the draft, proofread it, cut it down, and made a second draft. The draft was then proofread for grammar and relevance, with me revising accordingly. I did this process a few more times before I had peers review it. I then did a final check on the essay and submitted it. The hardest part of writing my essay was getting the motivation to write, but I could spend hours writing once I started. 

While reflecting on my paper, I realized that only some of the course learning outcomes were relevant to my paper, so I will only discuss those outcomes. During the writing process, I refined my “strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment,” developing productive methods to accomplish my goals. However, I still need to improve my time management to reduce the pain of writing. I also need to smooth out my essays, as even my best essays are rough around the edges. Finally, I need to think about appealing to my audience, as those thoughts did not occur once while drafting. These writing goals involving organization and audience expectations fulfilled another course learning outcome, as I did “Negotiate … writing goals and audience expectations.”

My essay’s characteristic features are that it discusses a map and talks about how my map impacts my life, culture, and family. I wrote about my map because I saw it all of the time and pondered it. Also, a month ago, my grandfather had a stroke, and I knocked down the map around the same time, and both barely survived. This similarity gave me a purpose in looking at this map, inspiring me to write this essay. The purpose of this essay is that I wanted my peers, who may not know about my subculture, to learn why I partake in it. This knowledge allows them to learn about me through an accessible medium, writing. My audience and I share knowledge of this essay’s nature because the prompt is available to us, but they do not know about my map’s story and its relations to other things in my life. Therefore, my goal in this essay was to bridge this gap, put myself in the audience’s shoes, and help people understand my love of maps.

Although my essay was a more straightforward thing to write and review than most I have written, I still managed to learn a lot about myself as a writer, my goals, and how to get at the essence of an essay.

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