I chose to write my essay about my belief in perspective. I chose this topic because I believe that we are unable to truly understand an event or situation when there are many factors constantly distorting reality. This can go to emotional stress or any emotion in general peoples perspective can cause them to blow things out of proportion due to their view on something. This is personal to me because with my experiences I have been able to see how different someones view on life can be from mine and how it effects their every day life. The project "This I Believe" is way to encourage people to write personal essays describing the way they live there lives and something they stand behind. It was originally based off of a radio program where Americans would go and listen to anyone who could compose an essay and read it on the radio which sums up the principals in which they live their lives by. This has become a more common and popular project to engage in. The rationale behind this project was to use our essay to reflect on out selves and the way we live. By looking at our personal experiences we were able to find the things we care the most about and truly believe. In order to prepare for this project we first had to find our topic. To do this we had to go through a long process to help us decide what we wanted to do this involved us writing about the people who influence us the most, the events that influence our lives, and the things in which we believe. From here we were able to decide our topic and then used the writing skills we learned about to construct our essays. We created a rough draft and from there we started to do editing and then moved to proof reading. We ended with a 350-500 word essay that was personal to us but still had communal relevance. The hardest part of this project for me was finding a topic that was relative to my life. I started out writing about something that I did not feel strongly about, after writing for a bit I came across a sentence that I liked in my essay. I took that sentence in a different direction and expanded on it and I turned my essay into something completely different than what it was at the beginning. As a writer I feel I could use a lot of refinement in my sentence diversity. Something I have struggled with is using things like semi colons or even commas. This would make my writing more drawing to the reader and it would encourage them to read more by preventing them from getting bored. Next time I write a paper I would give myself more time to come up with an idea and fine a more beneficial process to find my topic. I would do this because I still have hesitation with my topic but i personally like my writing but not the subject. For me being able to express my ideas has always been such a struggling thing. When it comes to talking about my views towards a subject I tend to hold back emotions and/or my opinions. Since this was a personal project I instantly knew that it was going to be very difficult for me to complete it. At first I thought I could just come up with an idea and write about it weather or not it was personal to me. However when it came down to it I really struggled writing about something that I personally didn't believe in. I have never thought about any subject like this; one that has made me have to concentrate on self reflection and self understanding so intensely. With no experience I had no idea where to begin; I was overwhelmed and I made myself overly stressed. At the end of the project I came to the realization that I am a very enclosed person and it is something I would like to work on in the future. My favorite part of this project was being able to use descriptive story writing in a unique way. I am personally not a fan of story writing but in this project I was able to use it in my essay but still add my own style to it. I hope to practice this skill in the future when it is open ended. I am personally proud of my use of descriptive language. I have not been a descriptive writer in the past but I encourage myself to apply that to my essay and I feel I did a lot better than I expected. I believe that beliefs are hard for someone to uncover because if it is something you have always lived by it makes them unaware of their strong opinion. I feel that the less obvious beliefs are some of the most religious/important to me or to other people because something we don't even think about it much more naturally occurring, I was never aware that I could have such a strong opinion about a topic. I am not a very strongly optioned person and to see myself express my opinions I never really realized I had has made me more aware of my beliefs and others as well. Now writing about my belief and expressing it it has made it more of a constant thought and has made me want to be more aware of the lives others are living. I'd also like to express my ideas and opinions more frequently.