Through out this unit, I learned a lot of valuable skills and strategies that will help improve my writing in the future. One of the most important skills I learned was the extreme need to come to class prepared. I had finished the book, The Education of a Lifetime, before the beginning of school which was instrumental through out the entire first unit. I was able to use the homework and class assignments to strengthen my understanding of the book. This in return would help with the very little experience I had with timed writing assignments. I used many new techniques in order to prepare and complete my essay. For example, at my high school we wrote timed essays but we got the prompt the day before and were able to gather our ideas and organize our essay that night. With this writing, I was unable to prepare on the exact prompt but I was able to do some “prep-work” in a similar fashion. I spent the night before the essay gathering evidence and ideas from the previous assignments we had done in class and for homework. I made sure to include a wide variety of examples and multiple ways to use each piece of evidence. With creating different ways to use a single quote, I was able to create a wider range of analysis which could be used for different prompts. With my notes and ideas in hand, I then read each provided prompt. I picked the first prompt because I had the most examples and prior knowledge on that particular question. I felt that having that list prepared prior to class time was significantly helpful. I didn’t have to spend time searching through the book to find the quotes and I was able to chose a prompt quicker and more efficiently. Although this strategy was extremely useful to my writing process, I think creating an outline prior to writing my essay was the most beneficial strategy. I organized the evidence in the order I wanted the paper to flow along with creating a strong thesis. It only took about five minutes to complete and it kept me focused as I wrote my assignment. I felt I had good supporting evidence and my ideas were clear and appropriate for the topic. However, my weakness during the in-class writing essay was forming those ideas into a concise paragraph and fluent essay within the time restraint. I feel I struggle with rambling and re-writing the same idea repetitively. With this being said I also have extreme test anxiety. I found myself getting frustrated and discouraged when I didn’t have the words to articulate a particular idea. In the future, I plan on creating sentences ahead of time to use in my essay. I also will create a time limit per section in order to prevent me from spending all my time on a specific paragraph. Overall I learned many lessons from the mistakes and struggles within this one writing assignment. I hope to use these to improve my timed essays throughout my college experience.