When Erin Schmitt enrolled in Rhetoric and Composition I, her first major college assignment was to write an essay reflecting on a personal experience. She needed to pick a specific experience that she could convey to her readers. Then she needed to reflect on its significance to show why it mattered to her. In this chapter, you can follow her writing processes as she generates ideas, develops her first draft, gathers responses from readers, revises and edits her draft, and writes a reflective letter to accompany the essay in her writing portfolio.