Almost Heaven

Reflective Memo: When I first embarked on writing this essay, I was initially troubled with what to write about.Talking to my friend, Kelly, soon changed that.After the full interview I knew I really wanted to capture the story that she just told me about a hitchhiking trip she was on.My first draft was just that, I focused more on the story than I did Kelly.After our peer reviews, and through the course of my editing, I changed the focus of the essay.Instead of focusing on the actual trip as the subject, I used the trip as an example of the subject, Kelly.When writing about hitchhiking it may be difficult to convince your audience that it can be a cool thing to do.In my initial draft, my main support consisted of all the physical elements of the trip.After my revising I focused on the mental parts of the trip.I dove into Kelly's feelings about art and strangers and used that as my subject for the essay.As I told the narrative of the trip in the background of the essay, I used the foreground to talk about the emotions behind each part of the trip and how they explain why Kelly enjoys hitchhiking so much.Since the profile essay needed to profile Kelly better, I think it really helped to dive into the secrets of the mind.After adding a lot more about the feelings behind hitchhiking, I actually took out some details from the trip only to push it back as just an example for explaining why Kelly does this.Since I already had a very detailed example, I now have detailed support for my main subject.I was able to change the perspective essentially.I also noticed that I tend to write sentences with a lot of extra words in them.This I attempted to clean up a bit my second time around.Along with extra words, I used the word "you" quite a bit in my first draft, which is something I also worked to clean up.With a few of these grammatical weaknesses I definitely make up for it with the essays' content.Hitchhiking and adventure are always exciting because there are so many possibilities, there's really no "cookie-cutter" outline for an adventure story.Overall, I am very happy with how this profile essay turned out.