Career of Choice Research Essay
The first writing sample that I will be sharing is my Career of Choice Research Essay. The goal of this essay was to write a nine paragraph essay about a chosen career. I chose Web Developer as my career. This essay prompted me to research and investigate Web Development as a career and everything about it. During my research I used multiple sources such as the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics, O*Net Online, and Salary.com. While writing this essay, I ran into a couple problems. First, I realized that writing an essay takes time and planning; you are not able to just “wing it”. Second, writing essays takes more time than you would think. I thought that I would be done with this essay in less than a week but little did I know, this ended up taking me about a week and a half. This was due to me either not having any ideas of what to write or me just not having any motivation to write. Even though writing this essay had its issues, I still felt that, by the end, I had written an essay that I was proud of. I also felt that I was able to learn more about a career that I was interested in. The two CART Habits of Mind that I employed during this project were Investigate and Persist. Investigate is pretty self-explanatory as this was a research paper so I had to Investigate many different articles and sources to find the information I needed. I employed Persist in this project because near the end of the writing process I was starting to feel way-less motivated than at the start. However, this also meant that I had to Persist through to the end and get the essay done.
Mental Health Persuasive Essay
The next writing sample that I will be sharing is an essay that I wrote in the 10th grade about mental health and the stigma that surrounds it. The goal of this assignment was to write about/persuade people into learning more about mental health and to treat everyone the same. Before I wrote this essay, I had to research many different sources/databases for information and statistics about mental health. I found multiple trustworthy sources that I could use as figures to persuade people. One of the issues that I ran into while writing this essay was that I felt like I repeated myself a lot. I felt that I had to restate myself often to truly prove my point. I chose to sample this because this essay was very personal for me as I have struggled with my own mental health and I know many people that also struggle with it. I was very passionate about this essay and making people understand mental health and how there should not be any stigma or prejudice against people that have to deal with it. Two of the CART Habits of Mind that I used while writing this essay were Investigate and Reflect. I had to investigate multiple resources before writing for statistics and facts about mental health. I had to reflect to make any changes or re-writes to perfect this essay.