Roxanne's English Blog

 A MUST have dish that would have to be present in order to represent my culture would be tamales. The reason being that tamales are very universal. Multiple countries and households prepare it a different way which makes the dish much more special to each person. My grandma always prepares it with masa spreaded on a banana leaf which then she adds chicken, jalapeños, either green or red salsa, and vegetables of our choosing. It is very significant to my childhood since the dish had always been prepared at most of my family gatherings. Tamales are the dish that holds the most cultural significance to me.

 A dish that brings me strong emotions would be pupusas. It is a Salvadorian dish and I grew up with it due to my step dad being Salvadorian. What makes me love the dish so much is because I remember being a little kid and my family at my grandmas house being together while we helped by grandma make homemade pupusas. Those moments are very dear to me which is why the dish is so important to me. Pupusas brought my family together and gave us a sense of Salvadorian culture and that is so beautiful to me. Pupusas will always be the dish I have immense love for. 

 The writing process that the class had to go through had helped me write my essay so easily. Since I had done all of the critical thinking and piecing of the essay it required minimal effort to piece it together. By learning how to break down an essay I realized what areas I struggle with when it comes to writing an essay. I found it difficult to find good concrete evidence to support all of my claims. Finding the evidence took more effort to complete but after I found good quotes it was easy to piece my essay together. Breaking down an essay and working on it piece by piece helped me build a stronger writing piece.

 Drafting is an essential step when writing an essay because it gives writers the leverage to improve their final piece. Drafting helps writers to get a better understanding of how a topic should be properly portrayed. When I was writting my draft it was brought to my awareness of the many different mistakes I had made initially. For example, I kept tracking off the original claim and summarizing the book which wasn't what was asked of the assignment. I also realized that I used a lot of fill in words which just made my essay lengthy or in other words quantity over quality. Drafting helped me get a better understanding on how to approach this particular assignment and future ones.

 When writing an essay there are multiple aspects of it that I find challenging. A certain area of it that I find difficult is finding strong evidence to support the topic. When looking for evidence it requires critical thinking of how the piece of evidence will support a claim in which that process I find to cause me a mental strain. Once i find good concrete evidence the rest of the essay is simple to complete since the hook of it has already been planned. A goal that I set for myself to improve my writting skills is to find at least two pieces of evidence I can accurately analyze and break down to make the rest of the paragraph easier to write.

Writing a paragraph can be difficult when there is not a strong argument or topic. In order to write about something accurately the knowledge and understanding of it needs to be there. If you write about something you don't agree on or have no knowledge on it the idea of the writing piece will be weakly conveyed. That is why when I personally write something I make sure I can explain it from my perspective properly with strong evidence pieces to back it up. It is hard to find evidence but it is the key to a well written piece.

 When building the body paragraph for the essay the part I found most challenging was choosing a quote. Although it may seem easy to copy and paste something, I found it difficult because I struggled to find what quote would perfectly represent what I'm trying to convey in my argumentative essay. As I am choosing different quotes my mid is making a mental evaluation of how I can word the reason I chose that specific piece of evidence. I definitely fid it more difficult to find an arguable claim rather than constructing the rest of it. This is because you need a good grasp of the main idea to choose the right arguable points.