Catfish and Mandala
My first major assignment in English 1A Honors was to write about a book by Andrew Pham titled, Catfish and Mandala. Within the work, the author undergoes a series of events in his life that change his perspective and ultimately how he views himself as an individual. The purpose of the essay was to analyze a turning point in the life of Andrew Pham and a turning point in my own life and then relate the two. Since much of the book focuses on issues of nationality and identity, I decided to write about my own crisis of identity and attempt to define myself as an individual and compare it to a moment in the book where Pham undergoes the same challenge.
Here I will show you my first submitted copy as well as my revision. My first copy received a B primarily because I failed to include enough personal detail, but also because I was lacking in my introduction. In the first essay, the section about my own personal story is fairly weak and there are minor grammatical errors throughout. However, by the time of my revision I had created a much stronger sense of what happened in my own life and was able to clean and refine my introduction which ultimately got me an A on the assignment. As my instructor Lankford wrote about my second copy, "much better 'in depth' analysis of your own situation!" This was far different from his first comment where I had to, "Further dramatize/analyze [my] own turning point."
The greatest thing I learned from the essay was how to take a personal story and weave it into my thesis, ultimately creating a better paper and argument but I also began to learn about how to create a more compelling and interesting introduction.
