Reflective Essay

Becky Fellows
English 101
The Difficult Process
Writing an essay is never easy work, having to write an essay collaboratively with two other idea driven girls is much more difficult. “The Explanation of Social Demographics” is the collaborative interpretive essay that Heather, Kaitlin and I cohesively wrote. We each had our own individual essays about somewhat similar topics and we needed to bring each of our essays together and make them into a cohesive essay. Writing an interpretive essay “Myths, Memories and History” was difficult to make the many choices. Then to have to hope that the choices one made would condense well with the other two in the group.

Each and every author approaches an essay from a different direction, some come at it head on, start from the beginning and end at the end. Others just write their ideas and elaborate and make the order more defined after they have completed the essay. The focus of an essay is really the defining aspect, without the purpose behind the essay there is no real determining factors. Looking back each decision that was made within both, the individual interpretive essay and the collaborative essay, from the purpose, and the context, all the way to the audience that is being targeted, are what drove the essay to its focus.

While writing the interpretive essay “Myths, Memories and History” there were many different directions to go to depict the relationship that memories and history shared with myths. Initially it was difficult to determine who was going to be the target audience for this essay. To completely understand and comprehend the connections that are being made in this essay the readers must be of a certain age. Above the age of 17 years would probably be best. Not that the essay is a difficult read but the contexts used could be considered confusing at points. The diction, context, purpose and connections that were used in this paper could have been the factors that made this essay more advanced and difficult to read. The collaborative essay was targeted to approximately to the same audience, generally my two group members and I had the same target audience.

As my interpretative essay was developing it was difficult to see how the contexts would connect the interpretation. In this essay specific word choice and concepts were utilized from other essays. The essays that were used were “The Gospel of Consumption and the better future we left behind” By Jeffrey Kaplan, “Marcel Proust: The Method of Memory” by Lerher, and “The Future of the American Frontier” by John Timran. Theses essay were chosen to be featured in the interpretative essay because they all had topics which correspond to the topics that were being used in “Myths, Memories and History”. “The Gospel of Consumption and the better future we left behind” discussed facts and history which was easily tied into the history portion of the interpretive essay. Also Kaplan’s essay used descriptive words which were perfect to describe the relationships that myths shared with history and memories. For example “conjured” and “reviving” were some of the words that allowed many connections to be made. “Marcel Proust: The Method of Memory” obviously focused on memories, this essay not only helped develop a basic knowledge on memories but also gave a different look at exactly how myths and memories are connected. This essay created some thought provoking concerns and ideas, “One could say that Marcel Proust had a myth on his hands, a concept which he conjured up about the origin of memories that he was attempting to prove to a disbelieving public.” Finally “The Future of the American Frontier” gave an example that coincided with the interpretative essay perfectly. While attempting to prove to connection of history and myths Timran’s essay was easily explained in “Myths, Memories and History”, “This myth is all about the outlook on the future of America. The “Frontier” the horizon where everything is better, this is a myth because no one person knows the future of a country or the world so to assure and promise to anyone that everything will be fine is pretty much impossible.” The context of “Myths, Memories and History” is what made it interpretive, utilizing outside sources to develop the argument of the relationships between myths, memories and history.

In the collaborative essay used the context of each of our own essays. We each had a quote from ourselves that help support our argument, by utilizing our own work I feel it helped us to become more involved to our topic. For example “Everyone has different memories of different situations, some good and some bad, and in situations people tend base their view of something off that one memory.” (As quoted by Heather in her essay, "Memories") I believe that by utilizing our own interpretative essays which have already been affected by other authors we included some of the most in-depth though provoking ideas into the collaboration.

The purpose of “Myths, Memories and History” is to compare the relationships of memories to myths and history to myths. These relationships are quite important to the outlook of the world. Memories are difficult to distinguish between false and true, they can diminish over time and can become hazy and difficult to remember. This being the problem with memories is what causes the relationship with myths, my being unable to recall every aspect of a scenario each memory become very unreliable. These unreliable thoughts and stories will suddenly be turned into myths “Myths are hard to define; they are invented stories, ideas, or concepts. Myths are typically a traditional or legendary story, with or without any proof of fact or a natural explanation.” As stated in “Myths, Memories and History”. History is typically considered to be fact and of course true because that is what the majority of the population believes, by having theses loop holes in history there is room for myths. Myths in history are usually just another view of an event, but also myths can make history what it is, as discovered in “The Explanation of Social Demographics” “Without these myths, facts couldn't be considered true because one would have nothing to compare them to.” This is displaying the connection of history and myths, and the way they depend on each other for their credibility or lack thereof. Within the interpretive essay “Myths, Memories and History” the intent was to carry the purpose throughout the essay. Dividing the paper into sections of introduction, memory verses myths; history verses myths, and then concluding with myths and a restated purpose. The layout and elaborating that was included in the interpretative essay was intended to clarify the intent and purpose.

Within our collaborative essay we wanted to have a cumulative larger thesis question to tie our entire individual essay together. A question that could and would be answered by reading each of our essays, from the essay ‘The Explanation of Social Demographics” our thesis question “Therefore, is it fair to say that one's own experiences and the history we read in textbooks influence the way we would solve a demographic situation?” This statement is what lead to our purpose to give knowledge to the reader to answer this question.

While I was writing this interpretative essay I attempted to take the less popularized side to each argument I made. The main idea I kept returning to was to make the connections clear, using my own words and my own interpretations of the sources I used and the questions I answered. For example in “Myths, Memories and History” I stated “Each one of these so called historical “facts” that everyone assumes is the truth could really just be yet another myth that someone tells you to make everything seem to be O.K.” by giving my audience something to think about that in the end the will hopefully come to a conclusion about. I struggled always having to keep my group members in mind as I wrote and I feel it went quite well. The many hurtles my group and I were forced to overcome will in the long run help us to become much better authors.

The collaborative essay “The Explanation of Social Demographics” which I wrote collectively with two other classmates was an elaboration and connection of all of our personal interpretive essays. We each had a question that we were to interpretative, in this collaborative essay we used all of our ideas and research to come together and give reason to the questions we were trying to answer. Some of the difficulties that my group had was our combination of layout, while we each wrote our essay the way we normally do weather that be traditional or not, bringing everything together was difficult due to the fact that we all too different views on essay writing. Also each group member came with their own idea of what is the most important aspect of an essay. I feel that the content and diction are the most important aspects to an essay they give the information and create an easy to read intelligent essay. Whereas it seemed to be that the rest of my group felt layout and sentence structure should have been taken into top consideration. It was a difficult process to work through having many ideas being discussed it was hard to keep track. Many times it took much convincing and possibly some majority rules to make a decision, but I believe along with my group members that we, in the end, had an informative combination of ideas which is “The Explanation of Social Demographics”.