Authors Note

The purpose of this note is to reflect on this essay, in which I wrote about mechanical literacy, which is important to me because it has been a huge part of my life. 

What went well for me while writing was being able to freely write about my experiences and knowing that what I write is true as long as it's true to me. What I liked the most about writing about this genre was that there wasn’t any research involved. 

An insight I got from Deborah Brandt’s article that I incorporated was the idea of sponsors, which helped shape my story by making some sections less about my experiences and more about how my sponsors allowed me to have those experiences and helped me grow and develop my mechanical literacy.

I decided on what information I should include based on how relevant it was to mechanical literacy and how much it has influenced my life and my choices, and how much of an impact it has had on me today. A challenge I faced in fully representing the full complexity of my literary journey was taking my memories, thoughts, and events from my life and being able to put those into words that other people understand and that fully describes what happened and does those memories and events justice on paper, without losing necessary details, but also excluding unnecessary ones.

The easiest step in the writing process for me was brainstorming, because all I had to do was think of things related to mechanical literacy that I've experienced or know about. The hardest step of the writing process was the drafting because I didn’t know what direction I wanted to take the story in or even how to put things I've experienced relating to mechanical literacy onto paper.

I received helpful feedback from one of my peers on how to improve on sections of my essay, such as providing more detail, adding imagery words, and giving more examples, all of which I incorporated into my next draft. The most useful one, though, was probably to add more detail as to how mechanical literacy affects people's daily lives and how that way of thinking is relevant to everyone. 

TIn conclusion, mechanical literacy is important to me because it has had the most impact on my life and is probably my most developed skill, which made it easy to brainstorm ideas for, but hard to take those ideas and put them into paper effectively. Things I have learned from writing this essay are how to separate ideas into different sections, how to turn free writing into a workable draft, and how to cut down ideas to fit onto paper. I'll use these in the future to write better essays and further develop my writing skills.