James, this is a strong submission for the first TMA and your overall grade is in the middle of Good Pass. Your commentary has achieved a mark at the top of the Good Pass band.
The freewrite could be rather more free, but perhaps if you have found this a useful technique to try out, you could also try letting go of the editor on your shoulder and letting the freewriting really unleash some more 'automatic' writing. Did you look at the handout on freewriting that I posted after the day school? The idea is to get to the point where all kinds of free association brings up stuff that can be full of interesting and unstructured images and ideas.
The passage of memoir/autobiography works well and has distinct strengths, including the way you build tension, and your knowledge of terrain which is expressed with nice details. In places the details could be even more specific. The piece is tightly written and the time you have spent editing and redrafting has paid off.
Do have a look at my notes in the text, which I hope will give you leads on possible revisions. One area I think you need to address is the balance between detailed reportage and more authorial comment with some emotional content - these two elements need to set one another off for the piece to really work well. You achieve this balance in some places but not yet in other places where the authorial comment could come in more to frame and interpret events for the reader. This is allied to the rhythm of the writing too: do read your work aloud so that you hear where you need to vary sentence length and type in order to keep the reader interested.
Your commentary is very good. You have paid attention to the development of your work and logged it lucidly. You could quote from notebooks or journals to illustrate the evolution of a piece, another time.
