Composing an Essay

Composing Driving with Dad

Activities- Prewriting, rough drafts, writing and reading to my mother, getting input from my mother and an outsider for perspective on what an audience wants and what I’m getting at, writing, reading, writing more.

Focus: I chose my focus by considering what memories I would like to relive and which ones I wouldn’t. I know that I don’t want to write about something that will be dull to everyone else because there is no relation to the topic. I felt that with this story the topic was general, learning to drive parallel to my relationship with my father. I organized my essay by choosing how I would like to segment it, where I would like to start, think about what background information I would like to give and what could be left out. Once I figured out what was important to the story, I began writing. Also, as a part of composing a story, I like to read what I write to people that may have been a part or a bystander to the situation I am writing about. For this story, I reflected on how I came about buying the car and learning to drive with my father, but read to my mother as I went along to see her reaction as an audience and her input as a character that I hardly involved, but knew what happened throughout the situation. I did not use journal entries for this, I remember most of what happened very clearly without having to look back at written accounts of it. I discovered what I had to say as I went along. I realized once I started getting into dialogue that my tone was going to be dry and that my point was to sympathize with both my father and I at some point in the story. I realized that it wasn’t just me learning something, but that my father was learning how to teach something. This helped me get through the story without losing focus or being too dull.