TIQA Reflective Essay

This semester in Ms. Wagner’s accelerated english class I learned many important writing techniques that massively improved my writing, like how to use TIQA format in paragraphs, how to avoid bad habits such as the use of “to be” verbs or the overuse of commas, and how to properly write a thesis statement. One of the first skills I learned this semester is how to organize my paragraphs into TIQA format. TIQA formatting is a way to set up a paragraph to keep it nice and neat. It stands for topic sentence (or transition), intro to quote, quote, and analysis. The best example of my improvement using this technique is one of the first writing pieces I did in English this year, the Book of Sands thematic paragraph. My rough draft paragraph …show more content…
When I walked into English at the beginning of the year, I was terrible at writing thesis statements. They were either too vague or too “inside the story” and they overall weren’t well written. After a whole semester of practice, however, they have greatly improved. The first proper thesis statement I ever wrote in english class was for my Life of Pi essay. The first time I wrote it, it was awful. It was far too inside the story. Instead of discussing the general idea Martel was trying to get across, I attempted to talk about the tiger and Pi. After i had Ms. Wagner read over it and give me some ideas on how to fix it, I fixed it up, got the lesson/idea across, and thus shaped my essay quite well because of it. The finished product went as follows, “Using these circumstances, Martel teaches the reader that in the face of danger, people find comfort in even the most unlikely friendships.” (Intro paragraph). I felt quite proud of that sentence, and I thought that I had perfected the art of thesis statement writing. But there is no such thing as perfection, and the time came again to write a thesis statement for our Things Fall Apart essay. This time when I went to write it, it came out far too vague and really didn’t have any opinion or thought in it. So once again, back to the drawing board. I talked to some of my peers in class for some advice on how to fix it, having them read it and edit it and help me out, and then I at down and tried my hardest to fix it. The final sentence I am quite proud of, even if it wasn’t as perfect as I thought it was. I wrote, “ Bringing new religion into a culture can help guide a society into better ways of life, showing the people kinder and more open traditions, but it can also pull families apart and break down a previously established culture.” (Intro paragraph). I changed the wording to be far more